User:JeffreyArthurVA/sandboxA
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Founders | Greg Shove, Nicole Alvino |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Areas served | Worldwide |
Key people | |
| Products | SocialChorus |
Number of employees | 150 |
| Website | SocialChorus.com |
SocialChorus, Inc. is an American multinational software company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that designs, develops and sells workforce communications software. Its platform helps large companies manage communications with employees and partners. Greg Shove and Nicole Alvino founded the company in 2008 and Gary Nakamura serves as CEO.
Company History
[edit]2008–2013: Founding and early years
[edit]Greg Shove and Nicole Alvino met at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where Greg was an advisor in one of Nicole's classes.[1] They formed SocialChorus in 2008, based on the idea that getting consumers and employees to tell a brand's story was more powerful and authentic than traditional forms of marketing. In its early years, the company operated as Halogen Media Group and focused on helping companies run online marketing campaigns. It grew following a Series A round of financing from Kohlberg Ventures in 2009,[2] and in 2011 the company re-named to SocialChorus following a merger with influencer management platform YouCast.[3]
Blogs and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were emerging into mainstream culture at the time and large companies were beginning to identify and communicate important information and promotions with their online advocates—bloggers, customers and employees who expressed a natural interest in talking about their products and services. SocialChorus built a platform that helped companies run and measure these advocate marketing campaigns at a larger scale.[4] Early clients included AT&T, Toyota and Peet's Coffee, and in 2013 the company secured $2.5 Million in Series A funding from existing investor Kohlberg Ventures and a new investor, Windforce Ventures.[4]
2013–2017: Evolution into employee advocacy
[edit]The SocialChorus platform was originally built to help companies engage with influential consumers but AT&T, one of the earliest users of SocialChorus, found that its own employees were among the best advocates. AT&T used SocialChorus to power an employee social media advocacy program called AT&T Social Circle.[5] Thousands of AT&T employees connected their personal social media accounts to the platform to receive company information and publish it out to their own friends, family members and professional networks. Interest in this new model of tapping employees as brand ambassadors grew, and this insight prompted SocialChorus to focus its platform on helping companies scale employee advocacy programs.[5] By 2014 SocialChorus grew to be used by more than 50 companies including Microsoft and Target,[6] and Kohlberg Ventures led additional rounds of funding in 2014[5][7] and 2016.[8]
2017–present: Growth into workforce communications platform
[edit]SocialChorus noticed that its most successful advocacy programs came from companies that had aligned and connected their employee base. It also recognized that over the past decade, large companies had amassed a range of disparate tools to communicate with their employees—from digital signage in office hallways to internal email newsletters, intranets and internal social networks and chat tools.[9]
As companies took on digital transformation projects and started to place more emphasis on the employee experience, SocialChorus evolved its product into a workforce communications platform designed to align employee communications across these disparate internal communications channels.[10] It raised an additional $12.5 million[11] in 2018 to fund development of integrations with SharePoint, Slack and Workplace, as well as expansion into Europe, Middle East and Africa with an additional office opened in London.[12]
Product
[edit]TechCrunch describes SocialChorus as a "platform to help organizations coordinate and communicate better with their employees."[12] The product is designed for two sets of users: employers and their employees.
For employers:
[edit]SocialChorus is typically procured by IT, internal communications, corporate strategy, human resources and digital transformation teams within large companies. Select employees in charge of these functions are granted access to a centralized publishing and analytics platform for all internal communications. They use SocialChorus to:
- Create internal content across a range of formats, including newsletters, posts, articles, videos, and push notifications.
- Schedule and publish content to any internal digital channels—including employee-only mobile apps, internal email newsletters, the company's intranet, digital signage located across company offices and worksites, and internal collaboration tools such as SharePoint, Slack and Workplace.
- Set up internal communications campaigns that automatically deliver and re-surface information to employees across multiple digital channels until they complete a desired action, such as acknowledging a revised company policy or registering for a new employee benefit.
- Customize and target information to specific teams and groups of employees. A company in the process of acquiring another firm would use this functionality to communicate distinct information to different tiers of employees, for example.
- Analyze which employees have viewed and engaged with information, learn what is resonating with employees, and measure progress on strategic initiatives.
Employers often customize their usage of SocialChorus through a range of integrations. For example, an integration with Microsoft Office 365 allows companies to use SocialChorus to publish company information across Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and Teams.[13]
For employees:
[edit]The SocialChorus platform maintains a universal profile for each employee. Using Boolean logic, it learns the content, channel and time preferences of individual employees and uses this information to serve company communications to them on the channels they prefer and at the time they are most likely to engage.
Employees working from desktop and laptop computers typically access company news by logging in to a SocialChorus desktop web experience along with an employee-only mobile app. The internal web experience and mobile app provide a central location for employees to catch up on company news, find information relevant to them, access their saved bookmarks, and browse their favorite content channels. Company updates are served in these channels via a news feed that is customized to each employee. A chatbot called Assistant gives employees one place to search for and gain access to company information they need such as information for newly hired employees or copies of their latest pay stubs, instead of having to hunt across and log in to various disparate internal tools.
SocialChorus also provides functionality designed to get a company's dispersed workforce—remote employees, front line factory workers, field staff, frequent travelers or anyone not working from a desk—access to the same information as office-based employees. Employees not working from desks may log in to the desktop web experience at times, but are more often reached through content their employer serves up to them on digital signage and via push notifications, emails or branded employee-only mobile apps.
References
[edit]- ^ "Nicole Alvino, MBA '04: Creating the Company of Her Dreams". Stanford Graduate School of Business - School News & History. 2 March 2018. Retrieved 2 July 2020.
- ^ "Series A - SocialChorus". Crunchbase. TechCrunch. 23 February 2009. Retrieved 2 July 2020.
- ^ "Halogen Media Group Merges With YouCast". Yahoo! Finance. 27 April 2011. Retrieved 2 July 2020.
- ^ a b Shu, Catherine (20 August 2013). "Online Marketing Platform SocialChorus Raises $2.5M Series A". TechCrunch. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ a b c Levine, Barry (18 September 2014). "SocialChorus lands $7.5M to help more employees spread their company's message". VentureBeat. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "SocialChorus Announces 14x Growth In Employee Advocacy". SocialChorus News Release. 1 April 2015. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "SocialChorus Closes $7.5M in Series B Funding". VC News Daily. 18 September 2014. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "SocialChorus Raises $10M in Funding". FINSMES. 5 December 2016. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Feffer, Mark (1 June 2020). "SocialChorus Shifts Focus to Organizational Change". HCM Technology Report. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "A day in the life of… Nicole Alvino, Co-founder and CSO at SocialChorus". Econsultancy. 21 February 2020. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Schubarth, Cromwell (30 May 2018). "The Funded: A stealthy Flex spinoff, an IPO filing and a $375M sale among midweek deals". Silicon Valley Business Journal. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ a b Lunden, Ingrid (29 May 2018). "SocialChorus raises $12.5M for its internal communications platform". TechCrunch. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ "SocialChorus Aims at Deepening Integration with Microsoft Office 365". HR Tech Outlook. 4 March 2020. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
Category:Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Category:Companies based in San Francisco Category:Software companies established in 2008 Category:Software companies of the United States