SocialChorus raises $7.5M to create brand advocates

Steven Loeb · September 18, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3936

The funding round was led by Kohlberg Ventures

Advocate marketing solution SocialChorus has raised a Series B round of $7.5 million, the company announced on Thursday. The round was led by Kohlberg Ventures.

SocialChorus had previously raised $8 million in funding, most recently a $2.5 million round in August of 2012. This latest round brings the company's total funding to $15.5 million. Previous investors include WTI and Windforce Ventures.

The San Francisco-based SocialChorus allows employees and brand ambassadors to consume, share and create branded content, which is meant to help them generate new awareness, engagement and sales. The employees and brand ambassadors can participate in content marketing, social selling, social recruiting, and employee engagement initiatives.

The solution trains advocates, manages content relevance, integrates with any internal system, runs on any device and tracks the business impact of every content and social engagement.  

“Leading brands are realizing that social and content marketing are much more powerful when not trapped with a small group of social media specialists,” Gregory Shove, founder and CEO of SocialChorus, said in a statement. “Our platform makes it easy for all employees and brand ambassadors to consume and share brand-safe content, and significantly improve the return on social and content marketing.”

In just the last year SocialChorus has added 100 brands to its customer base. It now powers Advocate Marketing for 10 of the Fortune 50, 15 of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies, five out of of the 12 Fortune 500 software companies, three of the fives largest U.S. retailers, four of the five largest consumer packaged goods companies, and three of the four largest telecommunications companies.

The new funding will be used to expand the platform, and to open the company's first international office in Vancouver, Canada.

In addition to the funding news, SocialChorus also announced that  it has the hired Lee Diaz as its new Solutions Director.  Lee was previously Senior Manager of Emerging Communications at AT&T, will now be responsible for designing employee advocacy programs for SocialChorus customers.

The brand advocate space

SocialChorus is not the only company looking to turn employees into brand advocates.

There is also Addvocate, an employee management service for social media, which allows a company to schedule, train, archive and govern the social voices of their employees. The company has raised nearly $5 million.

There is also Dynamic Signal, which provides a solution for companies to empower their employees as advocates using social selling, improved internal communication, employee engagement, marketing exposure and brand awareness. The company has raised over $33 million in funding.

Here is a video explaining more about how SocialChorus works:

(Image source: socialchorus.com)

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Addvocate

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Every company thinks they need to be social. As such, they're spending millions of dollars to do so. Unfortunately, they're underutilizing the most motivated asset they already have -- enthusiastic employees.

Your workers want to talk about their company, only they don't know what to say, or they're afraid to say the wrong thing. Instead, they do nothing.

We're simplifying and systemizing the task of posting, scheduling, training, archiving, & governing the social voices of your employees.

Competitive advantage

There is no product on the market that caters directly to the needs of companies wish to become social enterprises. Tools today only work for small teams and are too cost prohibitive to roll out to all employees.