Every 48-72 hours, more than one billion tweets travel through a conduit known as the Twitter Firehose. A percentage of that river of information is carrying a payload that is especially relevant to your business, your marketing solution, and your location. The question is –how do you find it?
One day the Twitterverse will find its place as a research tool in the digital stacks of the Library of Congress, a virtual Twitorial history of culture and business. But how can a marketer filter Twitter’s flood of information right now and tap into new leads and resources every day of the week?
Get to know Socedo. Socedo helps companies easily datamine social media leads and engage in dialogue with potential influencers and clients through a manageable pipeline. In a phrase: Socedo turns social data into warm leads.
The story of Socedo Co-founder Aseem Badshah could be headlined, “Local Redmond Youth Makes Good.” As our interview attests, Assem’s interest in the Web and social media began with a local job right in his own backyard – at Microsoft. At age 11, he became the youngest certified Microsoft Office user specialist in history. At 20, he was running Microsoft’s Facebook page. After completing his degree at the UW, Asseem relocated out of the Redmond rainforest to L.A. where he started a new media agency by the name of Uptown Treehouse. Now Badshah is back in the Emerald City and ready to take Socedo from private beta period to global launch.
Seattle24x7: What is the origin of your brand name and penguin mascot?
Aseem: Easy. We put together the words social and succeed, creating a six-letter brandable word that has an “O” on the end and a nice twist. Penguins are known as the world’s most social birds and they wear a “tuxedo” which rhymes with Socedo.
Seattle24x7: You began your computing and social media experience growing up in Redmond?
Aseem: I began building social networks and social media even before it was a “term.” When I attended Redmond High School, I built a social network for students to collaborate with each other and explore the ideas behind their high school work rather than just memorizing certain concepts.
Every high school student in the U.S. is reading The Great Gatsby, learning about the Civil War, and memorizing basic chemistry. So there is a whole curriculum for them to share, one that needed scalable collaboration. The social site was named Scriptovia and it was a fantastic learning experience. But I had to let it go when I started college. Either that or forego college and raise the money for the startup.
My interest in social madia and startups progressed into college at the University of Washington and my bachelors degree.
Seattle24x7: Was your business partner, Kevin Yu, also a student at the University of Washington?
Aseem: Coincidentally, I met Kevin who was doing his executive MBA while he was a development manager at Microsoft. Yet, we met through one of UW’s entrepreneurship professors.
Kevin is one of those guys where education is part of his DNA. First, he has an appreciation for education and advanced degrees. His MBA from UW would be his third masters degree, with one in China and one here in the U.S. Secondly, and this is something that really makes him wonderful, he has a curiousty for the business side of things. That was really one of the reasons why he went after his MBA. He was working for the technology side of Microsoft as a Dev. Manager where he worked on a couple V1 products like BizTalk server, and he worked on SeQueLizer, Windows phone, and some of the other SQL teams. He’s been into deep-technology architecture and big data enterprise software side for quite some time.
So I was pitching at a startup incubation event and Kevin was in the audience. These university events were great ways to form connections with other entrepreneurs. If you think about what Startup Weekend is, what TechStars is, what YCombinator is. They’re all about connections and tapping into a network.
Seattle24x7: What is it like to go to Redmond High School and grow up surrounded by Microsoft?
Aseem: It seems like I’ve always had a working relationship with Microsoft, whether through internship relationships, consulting relationships, or an agency relationship. My dad and mom both started working at Microsoft, so I’ve always had a close relationship with the company. It was certainly an influence. I got started playing with computers at age 6 or 7. When I was eleven, I became the youngest certified Microsoft Office user specialist.
Seattle24x7: Microsoft was a little late to the social engagement party, in spite of the Windos Vista tagline, which was “Welcome to the Social.”
Aseem: I actually ran the Microsoft Facebook page as a 20 year old consultant. That turned into a business called Uptown Treehouse which is now a social media marketing agency located in L.A. with $1.3 million dollars in revenue, and six fulltime employees. We still handle nearly all of the social media for Microsoft Windows.
Seattle24x7: Who have you been working with in social media, besides Microsoft?
Aseem: Treehouse has worked with Breaking Bad, the television show. We have done work for Grand Marnier, the spirits company. We’ve also done work for the National Cyber Security Awareness Group.
Seattle24x7: Where is your office located here in the Northwest?
Aseem: In Seattle we work out of the Microsoft office in South Lake Union, part of the Accelerator Network.
Seattle24x7: Your first product harnesses the social media power of Twitter in lead generation. What was its impetus?
Aseem: What is so unique about the Twitter channel is that you can conduct conversations with people without really having to know them. We envision this as a new paradigm for sales. Sales people can now engage with potential buyers on conversations that have already started. So that becomes a kind of immediately beneficial relationship where a buyer who is looking for information can find it with a seller, and social media is the catalyst for that.
Instead of the traditional methodology of cold calling or cold emailing, which is a very interruptive method, social media is challenging for that change.
Seattle24x7: We’ve just started working with Socedo in beta. It asks you to enter relevant keywords for your business as wellaas for the kind of work you’re doing and what you’re looking for — then it asks for the people who influence you. Please explain.
Aseem: We asked ourselves the question — How do we find people that are in the buying cycle for a product or service but who don’t actually know about the brand? Once you can identify your influencers and your competitors, the people who are doing all of this content marketing and who are attracting an audience, how can you can leverage that audience in social media to find qualified buyers for your product? For example, say that you’re selling encryption software and you sell that to CIO’s, well if a CIO is re-tweeting a Gartner Analyst who specializes in security, then you know that that CIO is in a security buying cycle. So you can gain visibility with those who are actually in your buying cycle.
Seattle24x7: So the fact that one Twitter account is mentioning other Tweeps that you’ve cited as being relevant to your marketing, that’s a signal that tells you they are in your cycle?
Aseem: Exactly, and that can be an influencer, a competitor, or employees at your organization. It lets you know who is engaging with this person and who will be a potential lead for your offering.
Seattle24x7: The leads are then stored in an internal backend CRM?
Aseem: Within Socedo, we essentially have four buckets in “The Pipeline.” There’ s the “Discover bucket,” the “Watch bucket,” the “Engage bucket,” and the “Closed bucket.” So as soon as you click on a lead that Socedo has suggested and move it to a Pipeline bucket, you are telling Socedo that this is a relevant lead for me.
At the same time, if you engage with any of those leads, respond to a tweet, re-tweet them, either inside or outside of Socedo, they will then move into your “Engage bucket.” You decide, who are my save leads, who are people I know I want to talk to at some point, who are the people I’m actively interacting with, and you move those people through your Pipeline.
Seattle24x7: What do you consider to be “best practices in Twitter marketing? For example, do you recommend re-tweeting potential prospects? How do you recommend approaching them?
Aseem: Re-tweets are really a kind of a light, “low-touch” way to get on someone’s radar. A better way to go about it is to actually respond to their tweet and add some value to the conversation, whether that’s answering a question or making a comment.
That says to the original tweeter, ‘hey what you tweeted about was cool.’ By commenting on a blog post, you’re giving credit to the author. They then have a reason to respond to you. You can get a conversation going. You can start to engage with that person and then move the conversation in a direction that makes sense for your sales process.
Seattle24x7: Does that imply that you would want to Follow the person as well?
Aseem: I think following people is always a good way to show that you care. That you’re not just doing it for sales, but care about what they’re saying. So I think it’s always good to follow and I think we need to do a better job of incentivizing that in our application design going forward.
Seattle24x7: There is a dilution factor related to the ratio of Follows to Followers isn’t there? If you follow everybody, depending on the size of your business, that could be an issue?
Aseem: You do want to keep an eye out for your Follower ratio. Some ways to do it include responding to people, start re-tweeting people, and then once you engage with them, then, at that point, you MIGHT Follow them. It kind of depends on how much follower ratio room you have to breathe. At the end of the day, the point is this: “I’ve found somebody who is interested in the product I’m selling or interested in my company who doesn’t know about me yet. How do I get them to know me?”
So, one way to do that is to Retweet them, one way is to Follow them, another way is to actually engage with them and build a conversation. All of those actions play a different role. The Retweet for example gives them kudos and credit, but isn’t something that they always see. I don’t necessarily see all of the people who have retweeted my tweets.
But if if someone Follows me, then maybe I’ll get an email and notice who it is. Best of all, if someone Replies to me, then I am going to read that comment and check you out.
Seattle24x7: Having participated in Microsoft’s Accelerator and the TechStars program, what kind of investor interest have you found?
Aseem: Today we have half of our $500K round committed so far. Initially we had been funded through the income of Uptown Treehouse.
Seattle24x7: Thanks for sharing! [24×7]
Visit Socedo at http://www.socedo.com
Staff Reporter Maddy Holup contributed to this article.
