Find out how this app can turn your employees into the biggest ambassadors for your company.

To empower your entire organization to post to the social media accounts of the business is to lighten the load of the marketing manager, or entrepreneur, and also generate massive engagement within the team; plus more interesting content!We discuss how employee advocacy can turn  employees into the biggest ambassadors and have fun at the same time.

Matthew Stormoen has been a digital marketer for the past 20 years. He is the founder and CEO of a marketing technology company called Mobibi, based in Santa Monica, California. Mobibi makes it easy to empower and reward employees for sharing important company news and creating engaging content. 

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Transcript

Jim James: 0:00

Okay, welcome to this episode of the UnNoticed Show. Today, I'm joined by Matthew Stormoen who's joining us all the way from Santa Monica, Matt. Thanks for joining me today.

Matt Stormoen: 0:09

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Jim James: 0:11

Now, Matt, you have a company Called mobibi. Tell us how you help entrepreneurs to get noticed. Yeah. So what we, what we do with mobibi is we've created. Kind of a crowdsourcing type content system or platform. And what I mean by that is, we use technology to empower your employees, to create content, to share important company news, and more importantly, to be engaged in the mission of your business. And how do you do that? When you say sort of One of the challenges for many companies is that they talk about vision to the team. They embed that with the team, but they have a marketing manager or people maybe who are in charge of kind of being custodians of that online.

Matt Stormoen: 0:55

Yeah.

Jim James: 0:56

And they're kind of swamped how you helping the company then to kind of like help the whole company become an army, become a whole sort of marketing team.

Matt Stormoen: 1:05

Yeah, so a little backstory. I spent 15 years running a digital agency i, I have a lot of experience working with the marketing operations within companies. And one of the biggest things that I noticed is when creating content, whether that be blog, video, or social. When you relegate that to one person or a small team, your, your content tends to take on a limited point of view. and if you look at brands and startups, entrepreneurs on social, they're very good at one thing or, or kind of a small niche. And. You know, what happens is, is, is after six months or 12 months, the same message comes out over and over and over again. And that's why you see engagements decline. That's why you see your follower growth stall, because one person has limited perspective. So the idea with mobibi is we want to collect content from the entire organization. And different points of view, diversity of voice, and what that does when you start publishing that is not only does it, engage your audience with new ideas and concepts, but it also gets your entire staff thinking, how do I grow this business? So now, instead of having three people thinking about that, you've got 25 or 50 people thinking that. So Matt, that really is the multiplier Isn't it. And you really get an amplification army, which is fantastic, but that's not without some challenges. So. Let's just talk first of all, about control because companies, especially bigger ones that maybe have shareholders, terrified about what gets said that might not be compliant some way.

Jim James: 3:00

Can you just tell us how does mobibi solve one of those problems, which is having lots of people writing on behalf of the company,

Matt Stormoen: 3:08

Yeah.

Jim James: 3:08

without any.

Matt Stormoen: 3:10

Yeah. That's, that's a common concern, which we generally address right away. And what I mean by that is we, we have user roles and permissions, employees who join this program on behalf of your company, we call them contributors. So what they're doing is they're contributing content. to be approved, rejected or reviewed. so nothing from a contributor can be published without a manager hitting the approve button. but I also want to, I want to speak on that point a little bit differently too, because I, I think, I think a lot of companies make a pretty big mistake thinking have to stay right in this brand. And can't deviate from the message or the concept, the design, you have it. And what I would, what I would challenge companies to, to say is, you know, other than delving into political or, you know, issues that are not to be touched, but who's to say the brand is right, isn't it, isn't it. Your audience, your target market. What happens is, and you know this from being in PR you get a brand manager that comes in and says, this is our brand. This is what we're going to be. But yet you have hundreds of thousands of customers and you're dictating to them. Why not flip it and send a bunch of different messages and then see what resonates with the customer.

Jim James: 4:38

Okay, so that's interesting. So you have basically in a way sort of crowdsource, generating content and. Under some degree of control. Does that then create a large bottleneck though whoever it is that then has to approve? Or is there some kind of AI filter of the kind that you have on the big platforms, which is kind of weeding out and looking for things that might cause a problem? Well, it's a great question. And I, I, I have to say, I don't think AI is to a point where it can actually understand the subtleties of the content. So in our platform, we do use. some of the AI, text analysis from Amazon called comprehend. So we are, we are scanning it, looking for flags, looking for certain words.

Matt Stormoen: 5:25

but you also, you know, you also understand that your, your employees in general should, and especially in a startup, should all be. Going towards the company and really promoting it in a way because their employment, you know, their employment is at state, this isn't giving your, your, you know, your audience, the ability to create content. This is your employees.

Jim James: 5:48

Yeah, this is a great point that actually, if you are worried about what they're going to be saying, probably made the wrong decision in or engagement in the first place. Right. And so how does that work from a to multiple channels using something like buffer or Zoho for a practical point of view? How, how would you set up mobibi

Matt Stormoen: 6:17

so the starting point for mobibi is to use the brand channel. So what I'll give you, give you kind of an, like an idea here. So we have a mobile app, and if you can think back to the olden days, client server relationships, right? You have your server and you have all these nodes

Jim James: 6:36

Yes. That's right. Yeah.

Matt Stormoen: 6:37

So think of this. Think of you have 50 employees and you sign up for the mobibi platoform, and every employee goes and downloads our app. Now they have a content creation tool in their hand, on their mobile phone. All they do. If they see an article, if they have a thought or an idea, they open up the app, they type in what they would like, where they're going to send it Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and then they submit it. That's their, that's their contribution. Now the manager comes in and imagine being a content manager, waking up in the morning and looking in the platform and seeing 25 ideas.

Jim James: 7:15

Oh, mate. I can only tell you most people would be like, thank God. I don't have to think of 25 ideas. Right? I mean, it'd be the best editorial job imaginable. Yeah. I mean, I mean, look, it, let's say you're just publishing once per day. That's 365 tweets a year. maybe you want to be different than the standard, you know, Mon Monday blues, you know, all the standard stuff. that is a lot of creativity to put on one person. And what I like about where you're going with mobibi Matt companies are resorting to AI to create content. And there's a danger that's becoming more kind of, anodyne really, isn't really much personality to it because it's created by AI. That's not invested in your business, but you're exploring a whole new source of contribution. From people that are going to have different perspectives about the business, but all related to the business.

Matt Stormoen: 8:12

Nope. Well, you know, I, there's a, kind of a frame I use when I explain this. You know, talk about like, I like cars, I'm an automotive enthusiast you know, one of the brands I like is Audi and they have this thing it's called a rear sports differential is going a little deep,

Jim James: 8:30

Okay.

Matt Stormoen: 8:30

know, instead of Audi tweets p out like summer of Audi event or save on your next car, I would like to hear from someone in the engineering team about some advancement they made. Automotively and now if you take our platform and you empower people in different units within the business, you're getting different perspectives, different content. Matt. That's absolutely true. And what it does for the audience, you know, be it customers, partners, and also other members of staff of course, it creates a 360 degree view of the. As well, doesn't it, which is fantastic. So we've covered off We've covered off sort of the source. What is it?

Jim James: 9:12

That's going to motivate someone who says not my job. I'm in production or I'm in finance to want to

Matt Stormoen: 9:20

Yup.

Jim James: 9:20

involved in creating content.

Matt Stormoen: 9:23

Yeah, that's a great question. And one that I, or I should say we immediately were thinking about when we started building this platform and. You know, if I can think back in my career, there was one company. I remember it incredibly well. They had a loyalty program based on performance. And, you got a magazine with products. You could only, you could only get it from this magazine and you'd use your points and get a gift or whatever. but I remember that. You know, 15, 20 years later, I still remember that thing about that organization. And so what we've built into the platform is a point system. You call it like gamification, we have leaderboards. you get, there's two things you get with this one, you get the, kind of the, the desire to compete with your employees. You get that natural comraderie, Hey, I just passed you on leaderboard or I've got this great idea I'm going to, I'm going to overtake you. And then the second thing is, and we encourage all organizations is to do, you know, small little gifts, whether it be a Starbucks card or, you know, some type of little, gift for the winner of the month winner of the quarter. You're as, from an organizational standpoint, you're not just getting this great content to drive your, your demand generation. You're actually getting your employees engaged excited about doing this. And that's the power of the platform is not just the sales and the revenue. getting your employees engaged and about your mission.

Jim James: 10:55

okay, so that's fantastic. And I think that you get everyone to participate, which of course is what every annual company event encourages everyone to do. Right. And says, come on, you play a part. And then they go away and they have no part to play from a communications perspective, at least. What about for the, for the customer or for the audience and for the, let's say the media, if they're seeing this stream of content coming from mobibi it's still coming from the company's corporate website. Isn't it all corporate

Matt Stormoen: 11:26

Yeah,

Jim James: 11:26

Is that right? Matt?

Matt Stormoen: 11:27

correct. Now, a caveat on that is the reason we call we call, our users contributors, is because on the flip side of them creating content to publish on the brand channel, they can, if, if they're active in social, they can add their personal social media. And then the brand can send out content that they can publish. So a use case would be like recruiting, right? Which is incredibly difficult right now. what you can do if you're an HR department is you can create a separate campaign and say, look, anyone who brings in a new recruit gets$500. and here's our recruiting message. So I would add my LinkedIn account, my personal one, the brand would send me the recruiting collateral and I would publish it on my personal LinkedIn account, and you can do this at scale because you could have a hundred people there. and now you're not promoting from a brand point you're promoting from a personal employee level. And then with our tracking and our, link shortener and variables, we track any, what employee, published it, where it was published and did the person who just signed up or put an application.

Jim James: 12:40

And,

Matt Stormoen: 12:40

did they come from that post., it's tracked full circle.

Jim James: 12:44

Well, that's very powerful because of course what we're finding is that for example, on Twitter, corporate, Accounts are not being followed, but CEO accounts Yes. are being followed. And that same with LinkedIn. Although you get a big corporate page by and large people not paying attention to those, within the community, the network that individual has, that's where the content is getting engagement.

Matt Stormoen: 13:10

Yeah.

Jim James: 13:11

that's a really wonderful, way that you've made it a parallel universe for sharing.

Matt Stormoen: 13:16

Yeah. And, and it's, it's funny you say that people not following brand channels, because why would you, if, if it's the same content being published, every brand. Not to be a contrarian here, but brand social is nine times out of 10. It's terrible. Because again, it's just, they're they're promoting their products like

Jim James: 13:38

Yeah, it's really advertising

Matt Stormoen: 13:40

yeah, yeah.

Jim James: 13:41

this social stuff is really. What corporate has been told to advertise Yes. as opposed to what the company may be mission is or what the contextual relationship between the company and the partners. Cause I'm also keen on talking only to end customers, but to partners

Matt Stormoen: 13:56

Yes.

Jim James: 13:57

businesses, the supply chain is well for all of us is mission critical Yeah. or if we've seen recently companies supply chains get disruptive, disrupted.

Matt Stormoen: 14:07

Yep.

Jim James: 14:07

All of a sudden it's chaos at the point of sale. So Matt, what about for the content about the quality of consistency, because there's brand guidelines, which says, you know, it must be logo on the left or the right, for example, there's also an elementof isn't that people have e got a high quality phone camera, some have got a low one, some might be posting poor infographics and some not. Now you mentioned there is sort of a contributor Is there some way that you help people to harmonize and upgrade their skills? Because not everyone's going to be contributing to the same Uber contributors and a lot of other people losing, interest?

Matt Stormoen: 14:51

Yeah, well, There's a few things. So we're when we're talking about a point structure and the gamification we're about all of the interactions. So whether that be, your approval rate. So if I, 50 ideas and one gets approved, I have a terrible approval rate. and so that'll be apparently immediately, if someone is not qualified to be doing this. The second thing on Brad brand guidelines is, you know, is incredibly important. I think, I think we've all become a little bit cynica l of, brands and their, just their, their message. That's so clearly crafted that you don't even understand who the brand is anymore. Cause they all sound the same breakout brands. I mean, you can look back at something like dollar shave club. He did weird videos with bears and, and someone would say, wow, that's not, you know, that's not brand brand appropriate, but guess what? They sold to a billion dollars for Unilever in five years, because what we have to do as, as marketers and as, as company leaders is we have to break out of this box that everybody's playing in and look. If you want to grow your business and you want to capitalize on a market, some risk is required and the higher up you go, the more understanding you get of that risk.

Jim James: 16:17

So Matt, what about costs? How much does my BB cost and what sort of size company would find this useful to deploy.. So

Matt Stormoen: 16:25

Where most SAS companies today will charge a per user basis. Which I had a terrible problem with because maybe I just wanted, you know, my assistant to join and she costs the same as me, so the packages we've created range anywhere from$49 a starting point all the way, you know, north of 500, depending on how many contributors you want. But to give you to give you an comparable is you can have one manager and five contributors for Aandraunderdred dollars. So. Thinking about this, like, you know, you're an entrepreneur, you have 10 people. maybe you want three of these people to create content, but you have one marketing manager, so you can have the marketing manager and five people for under a hundred dollars. I mean,

Jim James: 17:14

such a time saver too. Isn't it? Matt. Now about for you? Final question. How are you getting Mobibi any tricks of the trade on getting noticed yourself. Yeah. So a lot of things, one is finding people and reaching out to them. very manual process, depending on the stage of growth you're in, unless you're VC backed, cost per acquisition has skyrocketed. it's very hard to be bootstrapped and. Profitable, if you're paying for your leads. So leverage all the free tools and generate content upon content about content, the idea that you can only tweet once per day, or you can only post once per day, look, refresh your Twitter feed and see how many tweets come in.

Matt Stormoen: 17:59

There's nothing wrong with. You know, three tweets, three tweets a day, and clients that have used mobibi and enabled this contributor concept, they've ramped their publishing up 200% and it's paid off in spades

Jim James: 18:14

okay, because they're getting much more inbound marketing content, right. That's going out

Matt Stormoen: 18:18

Yup.

Jim James: 18:18

channels, Matt, that sounds fantastic. So you want to find out more about mobibi and about you, how can they do that?

Matt Stormoen: 18:25

So they can find us on the web, mobibi.com that's M O B I B i.com. you can find us on Twitter, on our social channels. It's onmobibi. And then you can find my personal Twitter where I diverge a little bit from just purely marketing and business talk. and that's uh@MattStormoennt on Twitter.

Jim James: 18:45

Great. And of course I'll include all of those in the show notes, Matt. Thanks. I think you're solving a real problem. so that's, I've been really excited to have you on the show because to get the whole team, to contribute to what the company is doing and to share that that's going to release a whole, bunch of enthusiasm and creativity from the organization and, and a lot of people are going to love that. So thank you so much for creating it and for sharing it.

Matt Stormoen: 19:08

Yeah. And thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

Jim James: 19:10

Absolutely. My pleasure. So you've been listening, Matt Stormoen who is over there in Santa Monica, where they got the course, the lovely Boulevard and the beach and, and the whole Baywatch thing going on. You been listening to Jim James in a sightless auspicious Somerset garden. Thank you so much for listening to the UnNoticed show.