Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Joe Doran, CEO of Rallyverse as part of our Emerging Social Technology Series. Rallyverse, for those of you who don’t know, is an emerging social technology company that helps read social signals online and turns that into content to push out to the market.

According to Joe, “Rallyverse tells brand what to say and when to say, on their wall, in their stream, and in their ads. We act as a cheat sheet to the social media manager to figure out what they should say and when they should say so they can get the best engagement in the content they share.”

I wanted to know more: How does this work? Is it scalable? What’s the case they are making to brands?

Rallyverse monitors the conversations in the social web so they know what is popular and relevant in real-time. Their technology matches what everyone is talking about to a set of content feeds that represent content the brand has and/or is cool with repurposing. Rallyverse also allows the brand to customize the content with a set of inclusion and exclusion queries that they apply to social media as social signals (or, the hot topics bubbling up). They combine together the social signals with the relevant content in real-time to construct something to say in the form of a post ready to share or tweet.

Their intent is to leverage this technology to service community managers and brands with the appropriate messages and content (either branded or not) that are relevant to that brand’s community.

But what is the real use case? How could brands leverage this to drive their goals and objectives? I pressed Joe on these questions and he explained how brands could leverage this to go after anything from lifestyle content to product-related content. The brands using Rallyverse become better participants in social and see significant growth in fans as well as significant increase in overall engagement. Joe mentioned doing some breakthrough ROI work for retailers in driving customers from social to purchasing. According to Joe this would make Rallyverse a scalable solution for anything from brand marketing to direct response marketing.

My perspective is that Rallyverse could be a great test technology for a marketer with a few conditions: They have to have an interesting set of approved or ok to use content (theirs or others) that could be connected with a subject. That subject or topics has to have a decent enough critical mass within the community they are messaging into to be relevant at scale. The proof will be in the pudding but definitely will keep Rallyverse in mind for upcoming test opportunities.

The things that Rallyverse is going to have to watch for in order for them to be successful in our opinion are the following:

1. Ensuring they can scale when more then one advertiser has similar content that targets similar interest points. In B2B this is all too often.
2. Ensuring that they can construct messages and copy that will learn how to get closer and closer to the brand cadence. The matching technology is neat but the more they automate their message construction while being sensitive to brand cadence the more they will experience acceptance from marketers.

We wrapped up our chat with Joe by asking him what he sees as impending social trends. His prediction is that this year is going to be the year where we experience the evolution of “Your Content is the Ad”. He continued to discuss how content marketing has been an undercurrent for the last 5-7 years but this year is going to be the year where brands begin to figure out how to stich together all of their different content into an experience that works to drive their goals. We couldn’t agree more!

What I find personally intriguing about Joe is his story and the fact that he is an ex-General Mills brand guy living and striving in the ad technology sector. As someone who has been agency side and ad tech side, I am impressed with his ability to succeed in both sectors.

–John Donahue (@johngodzilla)

Resident Nerd at Socialistic

For more information on Rallyverse check them out at:

Twitter: twitter.com/Rallyverse

Facebook: facebook.com/rallyverse

Website: www.rallyverse.com