Startup Spotlight: Addvocate helps companies tame social media

Startup: Addvocate

What they do: Provide a platform that website owners can use to track their own website against their competition, with data points collected from dozens of the top analytics sources.

Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

CEO: Marcus Nelson, who formerly served as head of social media at Salesforce.com.

Founded: 2012 Addvocate_logotype_red

Funding: $2M Series A from Rogers Venture Partners.

What I like about them: As social media services slowly but surely invade the enterprise, data leakage issues skyrocket. And it’s not just a security problem. All too often, careless employees share something stupid, which creates a PR nightmare, such as Home Depot’s infamously racist tweet.

Addvocate provides a centralized place for companies to monitor which employees are sharing what information. It encourages the proliferation of certain kinds of positive content and runs analytics to see which content performs most effectively.

Addvocate is both a way for employees to interact with their internal company community and to share outwards. Companies can use it as a foundation for their social strategy, tracking advocacy successes, incentivizing and rewarding employee sharing, and having a firmer grasp on the manifestation of their online reputation.

img_sharecontent

Customer include ExactTarget, UBM, 5000Fish, Vertical Response and BazaarVoice.

Unique service features: Employees easily share posts by clicking the Addvocate extension on their browser toolbar, sharing the link with co-workers and explaining why it’s relevant. As employees browse their streams, they can choose what they want to share with their own networks, comment on posts, and continue the conversation by suggesting other relevant content. The company can moderate all suggested posts, as well as recommend the content to other specific internal groups and set when the post should go live. Analytic tools track all sharing, letting companies identify social media top performers and also refine their sharing.

Phone_Profile_mockup

What gives me pause: I like what Addvocate is up to, but this is a crowded space, especially since legacy platforms, such as Salesforce Chatter or Yammer, could add these features. For now, Addvocate can sit on top of these solutions, which may make it a juicy acquisition target (and that last fact pretty much makes up for any qualms I may have).

Competitive Landscape: Competitors include Sprinklr, Dynamic Signal VoiceStorm, and SocialChorus.