DIGIVIZER 5 year birthday - the journey to deliver advanced analytics & actionable insights from the social web

DIGIVIZER turns five years old this week (15th October in fact).

Five years since co-founder Clinton Larson and I launched the idea of creating the Australian "white pages" of the social web and build social insights all linked to a single person.  I thought it of value to share over a few articles, some of the key milestones and lessons learned.

What opportunity did we see?

People are at the heart of social. And companies want to know about people. To acquire them, to serve them, to create more valuable experiences for them.  In order to do this, you need to know deeply about what matters to them.

People talk in real time in social about what matters to them. They connect, like, converse and share with like-minded others, content and brands - wherever they see value.  

Every time they connect, engage, share, or talk publically, they leave a digital footprint - providing signals about their needs, desires, life changes, frustrations, and, as a consequence, actionable insights.  When you know more about them, you can more successfully get the right message at the right (real) time to the right person in the right channel - which results in an increase in engagement and sales.  

We built our technology to cross-match the conversations taking place across the various social media platforms, to the individual, and then to your CRM. We track what people say about themselves, what they say to others, and what happens when they say it.  We deliver triggers and leads to our customers to action.   

2010 to today….

Since our launch we have expanded our technology by adding a range of targeting and engagement services that look at delivering everything from content, influencer, brand, servicing, social selling and lead generation programs. We start with providing a social opportunity audit which builds the play to win strategy and how to.  We answer - who to target, when and with what.  Then track this through to final conversion.  

Back in 2010, largely sales was due to thought leadership. We were then (and continue to be) ahead of the game.  So sales cycles were longer as we needed to coach and help people see the opportunity.  Still even in those early stages we had some amazing big clients come on board allowing us to largely boot-strap our growth.  Many of those clients are with us still today and I acknowledge much of our success to their support.  

Brands can no longer blast a message (per old media). Trust is more greatly linked to those individuals who build communities around their passion points and expertise. Social Influencers have emerged, and individuals choose who, what and how they prefer to get their news, information and entertainment. This is no longer a few media sources but generally personally curated - and nearly entirely delivered through digital. Brands must prove relevance through delivering great content and value as it relates to the individual. They must engage, converse and serve in a timely way. Customer Data and insight to ensure you mass-personalize and play to the interests of individuals is thus critical.  

Today as the awareness of the value of data, social CRM and social in general has increased, the sales cycle and onboarding is much faster.  We have scaled everything and we will soon be launching our first self-service user app designed to help any size of company to get leads using the social web, on a pay-per-lead SaaS model.  This is a key focus for us as it will help us get our technology into the hands of anyone.

Milestones since launch…

When you are busy growing, you don’t have time to look back and see where you have come from.  So today I share some of those milestones, the ones we are most proud of:

• We have built a highly talented team of digital, social, machine learning, artificial intelligence, NLP and client relationship experts, growing our team from 2 to 30 people.  One of those great people is Richard Heycock, our Director of Technology who joined us in June 2011.
• We have a great list of clients willing to invest in disruption (us). Some of the brands we work with:  Lenovo, Telstra, Intel, Commonwealth Bank, Barilla, Energy Makeovers, ANZ just to name a few (check our site for a full list)
• We have moved premises 3 times, to now reside in a complete floor directly opposite Wynyard
• We won Carnegie’s Den in 2014, were the judges winners choice at Hall Chadwick 2014 and selected as Head Over Heels portfolio CEO and business (current) 2014/2015.
• We became Deloitte Australia's Strategic Alliance Partner for their Social Web Analytics in December 2015
• We experienced 280% revenue growth in 2014
• We successfully raised seed funds to help fuel our technology platform growth through private investors, both who bring much to the table

I am grateful for the support of our long term customers and the awesome team that we have built.  There are many lessons we have gained and challenges faced, some of which I will share over the next few weeks.  I know when we started up, I actively read everything I could in understanding a successful tech company's journey from start up.

Time goes quickly, the opportunity remains great, and we continue to build.  Thank you to everyone who has supported us and been part of our growth journey!