One Green Bean creates Crowd Atlas platform to allow it to hunt for relevant social influencers
Kendall: ‘We think is is defining the influencer space’
One Green Bean is making a foray into the influencer space creating a new tech platform it claims allows it to trawl the net to find a broader range of influencers to work on campaigns.
The PR agency is claiming its new Crowd Atlas tool will allow it to look beyond the usual range of influencers who are signed to agencies and “disrupt” the traditional model of brand partnerships, while providing relevant results and metrics.
“The reason why we’ve done this is to solve a problem,” Matt Kendall, the agency’s digital planning director, told Mumbrella.
“It’s becoming increasingly hard for brands to stay relevant in this consumer curated environment. On the other hand for agencies the demand for low-cost, yet engaging content is increasing dramatically.
“At the same time we saw thousands of people out there looking at life through a different lens, recording it with a smart phone and creating beautiful social content.
“We took inspiration from the de-centralised model of the collaborative economy and developed the tech and associated service that connects this untapped resource to what we saw as an unmet need out there at the moment.”
It is launching at the same time as radio host Jules Lund’s own influencer platform Tribe, which gives people with 5,000 or more followers on social networks the chance to monetise that with posts for brands.
One Green Bean claims Crowd Atlas is different to similar platforms in market, such as Radian6, as it provides access to Instagram and allows the agency to work with the influencers while Radian6 only identifies them.
“The key difference is that we map influencer networks for any given niche using profiles rather than pulling in tonnes of content. And yes, we can do this for Instagram,” said Kendall.
The platform consists of three components:
- VINI – Verified Influential Network Identifier; the technology developed by One Green Bean that sits at the heart of Crowd Atlas and finds the influencer for each brief
- SAM – Social Artist Management: One Green Bean’s strategic, creative, social and PR people – the agency staff that collaborate with social artists and co-create content
- PIA – Platform Intelligence & Analytics: the rounding out of the service using insights, analytics, distribution and tracking that is a blend of both tech and human service
“We don’t have a stable of talent we need to sell our clients. It’s not a service influencers or clients need to sign up for. Essentially we start with a wide net and then with this tech we sort the signal from the noise using follower count resonance or engagement statistics,” explained Kendall.
“We’re not looking at influencers as purely being a media channel. We look at this audience data as essentially being a signal that these people are creating the best social content for whatever niche they’re in. We then co-create content with them.
“We think it is defining the influencer space,” he added.
In terms of how One Green Bean are monetising the platform, Kendall said clients are able to subscribe to use the platform on an ongoing, or one off, basis.
“It’s a blended service. First off there’s a subscription model for the tech. It can be a one off or an on-going subscription. That cost pays for the VINI IP,” he said.
“Then there is a service cost that are laid on top of that as far as finding that talent, creative briefs and co-collaborating with them and that’s done on a case-by-case basis. We look at the scope of the brief, what service is involved and charged accordingly.”
Currently the platform is available to One Green Bean clients which include Woolworths, Toyota, Mondelez and Playstation as well as to other partners.
Miranda Ward
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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This all seems promising but I still have a lot of questions about influencer advertising. For example:
1) How do we get an industry standard that clearly and prominently declares content as editorial or ad. I think this is not only important to protect consumers but also to protect bloggers. Who would police this though? Who could a consumer complain to?
2) To match the social reach of something like Facebook you need a lot of influencers. Systems like this and Tribe will find the influencers, but OMG who wants to manage production with dozens – potentially hundreds – of amateur publishers? It’s challenging enough going back and forth on approvals with one professional publisher. Sounds costly too.
3) Will we see sophisticated tools that are standard on social platforms like Facebook? For example how do you capture and retarget audiences across dozens of influencer accounts and platforms?
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How do I know who my influencers audience is – where they are are who they are?
How do I know the influencers audience saw / was engaged?
These two questions aren’t answerable by OGB, because the IG platform doesn’t have the capability for ‘organic’ posts – yet.
I simply won’t spend money creating content for an audience I know nothing about.
That said, if Facebook launched user profile stats tomorrow… Well then, that would be a no brainer.
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@David Agree. Transparency is paramount. Guidelines such as the ACCC are a good start, but as an industry we need to keep building on these.
As for managing dozens of publishers, it’s not as hard as it sounds. We ensure control via curation rather than the back and forth of amends. We provide guardrails and request a quantity beyond what we need to ensure we can filter down to quality. As for reach, there are myriad ways to ensure this (one of which is posting this great content on the client’s own channels with a social ad spend).
Your last question is platform oriented and best addressed to them.
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@Budget To answer those questions here would be giving away IP in a public forum. But if you are a potential client, do get in touch as we’d be happy to take you through how it all works.
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Great way to package an offering. That is genuinely quite innovative.
But I get the impression that you’ve only mixed up some jargon, acronyms and a cute sales spiel, rather that having developed any cutting edge algorithm or platform.
Look, I’m sure some clients will lap up the ‘smoke and mirrors’ but Vinni, Sam and Pia are actually underpaid interns.. am I right?
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Nice one Matt
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Interesting. I’m very curious if this is breaking Instagram’s TOS or API though…
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@Interesting, Definitely not on both fronts. We only search public information from the API and we don’t store any media.
Cheers @Nic
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