A vibrant, inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant social media strat­e­gy is at the fore­front of every business’s thoughts at the moment, and the ben­e­fits of suc­cess in this area can be huge.  If lim­it­ed man­pow­er, and resources are avail­able, how­ev­er, man­ag­ing the strat­e­gy effec­tive­ly – and reap­ing these rewards — can be nigh on impos­si­ble.  A New York start-up, called Per­co­late, is look­ing to make life eas­i­er for any­one work­ing in a con­tent man­ag­er posi­tion, or want­i­ng to cre­ate fresh and inno­v­a­tive con­tent strate­gies.  The Man­hat­tan based com­pa­ny – which employs a ‘veg­etable strate­gist’ to encour­age employ­ees to eat health­ily, and has an open vaca­tion pol­i­cy – has expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant growth over recent years, and is in the process of expand­ing its oper­a­tions to a UK office.

Har­ness­ing user gen­er­at­ed content

Per­co­late already pro­vid­ed busi­ness­es with a way to man­age their over­all social media strat­e­gy and cre­ate unique and inter­est­ing con­tent, but it has just launched a ser­vice designed to help com­pa­nies grow and uti­lize audi­ence engage­ment with their brand.  The new fea­tures can ben­e­fit social media savvy busi­ness­es by encour­ag­ing their fol­low­ers to par­tic­i­pate and gen­er­ate con­tent that the busi­ness can then use for mar­ket­ing pur­pos­es.  A com­mon engage­ment strat­e­gy is to ask cus­tomers to send a pho­to show­ing how they use a cer­tain prod­uct, and these devel­op­ments trans­form the con­tent audi­ence mem­bers cre­ate into gen­uine­ly use­ful – and cheap — mar­ket­ing mate­r­i­al.  The new fea­tures allow com­pa­nies to make sim­ple, polite requests for the rights to use user gen­er­at­ed con­tent over Twit­ter.  The user can then con­firm that they are fine with the request through a sin­gle click, pro­vid­ing a has­sle free way for com­pa­nies to gain access to qual­i­ty user gen­er­at­ed con­tent with­out wor­ry­ing about trans­gress­ing the law or hav­ing to pay for it.

Old con­cept, new spin

Savvy social media man­agers may rec­og­nize some of these ideas from a recent fund­ing round that saw a start­up called “Chute” raise $7 mil­lion in series A fund­ing. How­ev­er, Per­co­late CEO James Gross was keen to point out that the key dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tor in his com­pa­ny’s offer­ing stream­lines the process of request­ing user per­mis­sion to the point where the oper­a­tion can be mea­sured in clicks rather than tweets and image exchanges.

It seems brand mar­ket­ing is set to become just that lit­tle bit more collaborative.