Helping brands take the guesswork out of their social marketing ROI.
CliEnt
SocialChorus
Challenge
Design a SaaS platform for marketing teams to manage and report on social media campaigns
Outcome
Secured revenue-generating contracts with more than twenty-five Fortune 500 consumer brands
Summary
I led the UX and UI design of SocialChorus’ initial social marketing SaaS platform on an Agile development team. This included responsive web and early conceptual mobile applications. The platform allowed Influencers to gain access to branded social currency and content to share with their followers. Brands received real-time metrics with the ability to track everything from social actions, to earned media value and brand influence.
“Thrusted into the complexity of social media, Michael has captured the essence of what a brand needs in a social media market tool with the details of what an influencer expects when sharing actions through their social media channels. ”
Situation
SocialChorus had pivoted from running a successful ad network (as Halogen Media) to a social media marketing SaaS company. Embedded in the development team, I was asked to design their first Influencer Relationship Marketing (IRM) platform that would allow marketing teams to work more efficiently with their best advocates by running social media campaigns and display engagement results in a real-time dashboard.
Challenges
As social media channels sprouted rapidly, brands were lost when trying to work with Influencers/brand advocates across multiple channels. Their efforts were fragmented, not scalable and ROI was difficult to claim as new social apps were quickly gaining traction and there wasn’t a tool or software that would allow them to centralize and monitor their efforts.
SocialChorus wanted to help brands unify their efforts and enable direct and enduring relationships with their best advocates and fans, and advocates needed a more efficient way to communicate with brands they worked with.
Without precedent nor any known existing similar technology, we needed to deliver on a promise of a social media marketing campaign platform with a real-time dashboard “command center.”
Actions
This was my first foray into working with an Agile development team, and handling all aspects of UX and UI alone. It was a lot to take in and understand, but with the help of great developer teammates, I learned rapidly and developed a repeatable process with design sprints 1-2 weeks ahead of development sprints to minimize waiting for new wireframes or mockups to review and build. At weekly inception meetings, I’d walk the development team through UX, wireframes/UI so they could assign a point value and prioritize its delivery in the Pivotal Tracker backlog.
From the onset, I regularly scheduled and conducted both qualitative and quantitative user research with internal team members and brand advocates using a variety of methods; in-person using paper and low-fidelity clickable mock-ups, observing their work flows on site, email surveys, phone calls, video and screen sharing. Sharing my research results, ideas and sketches with all stakeholders including the CEO helped to get alignment and buy-in for design direction.
I worked closely with the PM to workout our information architecture (IA), taxonomy, writing user stories and addressing feature requests and support issues. With each release, I’d selectively sit with the developers to educate them on the UX challenges by asking them to perform our user’s tasks without using their keyboard shortcuts to get around. This helped them to empathize with things like slow load speeds and poorly labeled buttons or fields. Through pair designing with developers, I’d work through impromptu fixes or even new features or flows.
Results
Together, we designed and built a cloud software service for desktop and mobile that led the change in how brands approach marketing through social media. SocialChorus continued to compete in the social media marketing space for a few years before pivoting again to focus on internal company employee advocacy.
Big Wins:
1.
Initial MVP released with 6 months was enough to spark interest and commitments from twenty-five Fortune 500 brands.
2.
Our team learned to operate more efficiently with Agile development and Pair Programming through an engagement with Pivotal Labs.
3.
The initial pilot campaign with Mountain Dew (Pepsi Co.) was a huge success and led to additional revenue-generating contracts with several Pepsi Co. brands.