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Context matters, especially when you butt into someone else’s conversation. Yet more than context, when interrupting a discussion, timing is everything. Earshot is building its business on that idea, by helping brands improve the timing of their social media conversations.
Founded in 2012 and recently raising a $1.7 million seed round, Earshot has grown by helping large multi-national brands right-size their social media pitch to individual users. That is finding “people using social media at the right place and right time,” said CEO and co-founder David Rush.
Typically, big brands have tried to connect with people on social media platforms like Twitter, using direct Tweets or using programmatic advertising. Earshot has platforms to do both of those things, and it claims to do both better by factoring in data in real-time.
By considering a user’s mood, keywords, location, weather, social media bio, social behaviors, influence on others and the time of the day, Earshot’s platforms assign a user a “Decibel Level” score. The score is unique to each brand’s marketing goals and helps set priorities. The score tells brands “What is the likelihood of a person becoming a customer based on all of these conditions?” said Rush.
“One Tweet might score very high on a campaign for Honda, but might score very low for Toys"R"Us,” said Rush.
Higher scores should get more attention. But, what kind of attention users get from brands depends a lot on the company’s goals.
“It depends on the client and what resources they have and how they want to engage,” said Rush. “What we do see is industries like automotive or insurance, where there is a higher life time value of a customer, they can justify a one-to-one customer conversation.”
It's worth investing more time in individual customers that bring in high revenue. For “CPG companies, it's more of a game of reach and automation.” Programmatic advertising would make more sense.
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Spotify, for example, straddles both of those strategies. “They used us to engage with those people who were at the Bonnaroo festival,” said Rush.
Music festival goers are willing to spend money on music, so Spotify reasons they might be willing to spend money on premium Spotify subscriptions, thus justifying more one-on-one engagement.
On a larger scale Spotify has also programmatically used Earshot to promote a workout playlist to “people that were at fitness centers or were self-proclaimed fitness buffs,” said Rush.
People consuming music during a workout are not necessarily music enthusiasts, or likely paid subscribers, thus justifying a lower cost marketing approach.
Going forward, Rush believes there is a lot more Earshot can do to improve timing and context for social media marketing.
“We are looking more broadly at what relevancy is,” said Rush. “We think location is important, and new data sources, different API’s.” Demographics and more weather data are being considered.
“The experience of discovery on social media is a really effective way for people to connect with people on mobile devices,” said Rush. “Brands are really focused on authenticity and that’s great, but it always comes back to reach for them. We are using data to help enable that.”
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