Got a few seconds to kill? If you’ve got six, then it’s enough time to Vine. If you have the luxury of 15 seconds to yourself, then you can make an Instagram video. Or, in about the same amount of time you can now give kudos to one of your favourite companies.
At least that’s what Toronto-based Influitive is hoping you’ll do with its new mobile app Maven. Influitive launched last year at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference with its Web-based Advocate Hub marketing platform and now its layering an iOS app on top of that solution. Maven is due out as early as today, depending on when Apple Inc. gives its approval for it to be published to the App Store.
Whereas AdvocateHub allows marketing managers to issue longer, more mission-like tasks to their company’s advocates, Maven will hone in on tasks an advocate can complete in a short period of time. It could involve making a video endorsement, rating a product, writing a quick review, or filling out a survey. The app is geared towards the advocates on Influitive’s network and allowing them to maximize their level of influence, according to Influitive CEO Mark Organ.
“We think there are a distinct class of advocates that will only wan to do this on mobile,” he says. “They have 30 seconds before catching a train. Instead of firing up a game, they can help out a company they like a lot.”
Maven will also feature a new score for each advocate designed to measure their influence across multiple companies. Right now on AdvocateHub, individual scores are only kept for each specific company. The new, overarching score will allow Influitive to further motivate its members to engage in completing assigned tasks and challenges.
“The cool thing is we can make the application more engaging by putting a game overlay on top of what our customers are doing,” Organ says. “Right now the global Influitive challenges are only in the Maven network.”
More than providing incentive to engage with companies, the Maven score is also a Klout competitor. While Klout measures influence by measuring what traction people get based on their message amplification and engagement, Maven will issue points based on the impact an advocate has on the buying decisions of others.
After three months of beta-testing, Influitive is getting good feedback on the app and hearing that simple challenges work best on the mobile platform, Organ says. One company asked its advocates to record a short video endorsement of its product, which it edited together into a reel featuring many endorsements from different people.
Maven comes 18 months after AdvocateHub’s launch. Most of Influitive’s customers are B2B software firms, Organ says, and have been asking for a mobile app. But it’s taken some time to nail the experience on its head.
“We’re really focusing on mobile,” he says. “It’s my belief in understanding advocates and the way they work, the world is really moving to mobile.”
That being said, AdvocateHub’s Web service is also getting some updates:
- Advocate Anywhere – A widget that marketers will be able to embed on any Web page that allows users to ask for their help or collect feedback.
- Reporting – New tools to analyze activities, advocates, and groups in reports with visual dashboards and drill-down capability.
- Swag – Influitive has partnered with Printfection to more easily deliver rewards to advocates. Customers can purchase gifts, upload redemption codes into AdvocateHub, and publish to advocates.