The intersection of marketing, social intelligence, adtech & eCommerce with Swish Goswami

Apr 27

This week on the Doing it Big podcast, we chatted with Swish Goswami on all things social intelligence, and how shifts in eCommerce are impacting marketing & adtech. Here’s a recap of what we learned.

Below are some transcribed highlights from the interview, lightly edited for length and clarity. Stream the audio version for our full conversation.

What is Trufan (& now SocialRank)? How are the brands you work with leveraging your products?

Trufan is a social intelligence platform. We built it to help brands engage with their grassroots communities that are made up of brand advocates and micro-influencers. And with the acquisition of SocialRank, we also help our customers slice and dice their entire social audience to any audience that they want to market to. Whether that’s based on the location of those followers, the keywords in their bios, how many followers they have and their engagement. We work with over 100 marquee brands like Samsung, the NBA, the NFL, Netflix, Saudi Aramco United Talent Agency, along with a lot of small to medium sized businesses, especially in the last 3 to 4 months that have come on. We’re really, really excited to also work with DTC (direct-to-consumer) companies, and we’ve seen actually quite an influx of those come in in the last couple of months.

With more & more digitally-native DTC brands popping up and larger retailers actually launching DTC channels, what impact are you seeing this have on marketing and adtech for brands and merchants alike?

I think there’s two things. Traditional companies, even like Hershey’s for example, are now looking to adopt an online strategy to be able to take products that are on shelves and sell them online. So that leads to two things on the marketing front. One is that a lot of our clients right now are looking for better targeting. They’re looking to be able to find buying intent as soon as possible, and then to be able to qualify, whether that buying intent is something that could be sustainable or it’s one-off. So for Hershey’s, the customer, do they actually like Reese’s Pieces, are they talking about Reese’s Pieces over a sustained period of time? Are they likely going to be a customer that doesn’t just buy from us once but buys from us multiple times? The second thing, I think, is engagement. A lot of DTC companies are starting to build incredible brands. You look at a brand like Away. I have an Away suitcase. I love the brand that they’ve built online and how they’re going about engaging with their community and making every single member feel valued from the point of purchase all the way to being able to go and convert them even on social media into a follower.

What are all the ways eCommerce merchants can leverage social intelligence?

One is identifying micro-influencers. So the big pitch that we’re trying to make at Trufan is that instead of working with people that have millions of followers, we believe you should be working with people that have between 20k-150k followers. Why? Because they’re likely already following you, they’ve perhaps already bought from you even in the past. So they’re definitely aligned with your mission and what you’re trying to put out. They’re cheaper to work with, and they tend to have higher engagement rates than people with millions of followers. That’s number one — on our platform, you come on, you can filter your following and find these micro influencers and hopefully put them into a campaign and activate them. The second thing is, you can reward your most engaged fans. On our platform with social intelligence, you’re able to go through and calculate who the people are that really engage with your content that most, and it would be awesome to give them a 20% discount .. it would be awesome to invite them to a VIP meet & greet. It would be amazing to give them exclusive access to a product before it even comes out.. Those are the types of things that you can do to really try to build up buzz and hype, but also to keep your most loyal fans in your network. The third thing would be to take a look at all of your brand partnerships and to be able to really figure out whether they’re working or not. So on our platform, you can actually take a look at another brand that you want to work with and see what their follower base even looks like, who they are targeting and is that follower base something that’s new for us? Or is that follower base something that we’re already hitting through our current channels of marketing. You can go through and see the overlap of followers that you and another brand might have before and after a campaign has been set up.

About Swish Goswami

Swish is a 22 year old serial tech entrepreneur, LinkedIn Youth Editor, three-time TEDx speaker, and UN Youth Ambassador. He has been awarded the United Nation’s Outstanding Youth Leadership Award, Startup Canada’s Young Entrepreneur Award, Plan Canada’s Top 20 under 20 and has been recognized as the “Face and Future of Canadian Entrepreneurship” by UPS Canada. Swish is currently the CEO & Founder at Trufan, a venture-backed social intelligence startup based in Toronto.