According to the sages at Business Insider, social media doesn’t have a traditional ROI metric. This should surprise absolutely nobody. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be blogging, tweeting, and Linkedin-ing to the hilt. But the most difficult part of getting employees inside and outside of the marketing department to contribute is the convenience factor. You have to face a cruel truth: the typical employee is not Gary Vaynerchuk.
Meddle, a startup that’s been on my radar for a few months and which I recently saw demoed at Hatch Match, has a partial answer to the I-don’t-have-time-to-blog conundrum. Their software just makes it easy for employees to contribute snippets of content for the social media troika of Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. A browser bookmark plugin is all the installation that’s necessary: you just click on content and then add a short comment to distribute it to the aforementioned social media channels.
Status posts will include an embedded link pointing back to your company’s own branded Meddle page, where all the content resides and is wrapped to looked pretty.
Meddle gets that social media is closer to intermittent conversations you have with your customers, and shouldn’t read like Marketing mush. Meddle software lets employees contribute to the social media stream whenever they find something relevant. Bottom line: instant social media that lets the busy employee ‘ride the hashtag’.
There are, of course, other players with similar services. But Meddle is particularly easy to use. For now the service is free. It’s worth exploring.