twtMob rebrands as Speakr, raises $2.9M in funding

Speakr helps brands control and guide social conversations through influencers

Does anyone really listen to advertising anymore? The tricks have been around for forever and we all know them. And, honestly, nobody really believes that companies are going to be honest. Comcast isn't going to tell you about their terrible customer service, which was exposed this past summer. But you know who will? Your friends, and the people who actually use those services.

That is why word of mouth, especially in the age of social media, where regular voices have become so amplified, is becoming increasingly important. That is where Speakr (formerly twtMob) comes in; it helps connects brands and social influencers in order to help the company control, and guide, that social message.

The company has announced that it has raised $2.9 million in an oversubscribed round led by Toba Capital and which included Allegro Venture Partners; Brett Hurt, co-founder and former CEO of Bazaarvoice; Ed Snider, Chairman of Comcast Spectacor; and Nick Gross, CEO of STRZ Enterprises, among others.

Speakr had previously raised $930,000 from Scout Ventures and other angels like Aber Whitcomb, co-founder of Myspace; David Seldin, former President of the Jacksonville Jaguars; Sean Avery; and Henrick Lundqvist, among others. This latest funding brings the company’s total financing to $3.8 million.

Founded in 2010, Speakr's technology platform, and network of over 20,000 top influencers from networks that include Instagram, Twitter and Vine, helps deliver social media advertising that is social, while also controlling the messaging and delivery. It helps companies with predicting the results and impact on the audience, and allows brand to reach an even larger audience than traditional marketing can. 

"Advertisers are struggling both with reaching the millennial generation with traditional advertising, as well as trying to find the best way to reach non-millennials through social media," Marco Hansell, CEO of Speakr, told me in an interview. "However, traditional word-of-mouth tactics usually lack scale, control or predictability."

So how does Speakr help? Well, for example, a customer might use Speakr for a product launch. They could physically have the company's influencers use their product and share their experiences with it, or provide their fans with an opportunity to share in the experience with them. Speaker with then usually have another 50 to 100 influencers amplifying the content even further. And then they may have another layer of influencers conversationally talking about the product and its features or distributing branded content from the brand.  

All of this added to up to what Hansell calls a "multi-touch, multi-strategy campaign, which our technology works to identify which approach was most effective, and optimizes against those approaches in real time to drive the best results for the brand."

"Most customers come to us with a desire to either have influencers create content, use their product or physically attend their brand events, distribute content or start conversations," he said. "The common thread is that the brand coming to us is looking for a high impact way to influence consumers through the trusted voices of the influencers."

The Los Angeles--based company has executed more than 1,000 social influence campaigns for companies such as Microsoft, Kia, Corona, and Samsung as well as all of the major movie studios and several television networks. Speakr has signed deals with more than 60 brands in the past two years.

While there other companies who also use influencers to leverage brands on social media, including The Audience, Ad.ly and Niche, there are three things that separate Speakr from those other companies.

First, it has collected four years of Historical Data which "helps us develop very good predictive models around influencers and their performance adding levels of control and predictability that is not present in one-off influencer engagements," Hansell said.

Then there is its large number of influencers, and its proprietary value algorithm. 

"By having such a large platform with over 20,000 influencers, and corresponding data on performance, demographics on their audience and network wide stats we are able to provide our brands with economies of scale in identifying the absolute best match of influencers and their corresponding value, which is determined by our value algorithm," he said.

The other big piece of news out of the company on Monday was the changing of its name from twtMob, a move that Hansell says reflect the company's growing influence on networks outside of Twitter.

"The main deciding factor behind this was moving away from a solely Twitter focused name. We’ve been marketing on Instagram nearly two years before Instagram Promoted Posts existed and are continuing to bring similar solutions to a variety of other platforms," he said. "A lot of our brands are looking for us to bring the same level of scale, authenticity and predictability to every platform that they engage with Social Influencers.  This will mean more multi-platform campaigns across increasingly larger influencer groups."

In addition to its current networks, Speakr is also in beta tests on Snapchat, and will use the new funding to continue to expand to other networks, including Facebook and Pinterest. it will also be investing into more analytics and predictive tools that help it to better assess the value of an influencer on those platforms.

Ultimately, Hansell sees Speakr as the best combination of technology and human interaction to help brands sell their products.

"We believe in combining the best of technology with a human centered approach. With this everything we do has elements of human touch, whether its in the categorization of our users, or in the method in which we define our data," said Hansell. 'In the next five to ten years we expect that with our help, influencer marketing will potentially become the dominant spend amongst their digital arsenal."