Company: The Echo System
Website: www.theechosystem.com
Founder: Lance Neuhauser
Headquarters: New York City
Year Founded: 2010
Investor: GSV Capital Corp.
Employees: 16
Twitter: @theechosystem
Brief Company Description: The return on social company. We’re a social analytics and commerce platform that tells brands the value of its fans and uses social data to drive engagement and profitability.
By Lance Neuhauser, founder and CEO
Product Overview
Founded in 2010, The Echo System presents a social measurement platform and a variety of social commerce plug-ins that allow ecommerce brands to effectively measure their return on social and make informed decisions about social activities and investments. The company’s recently re-launched Echo Effect Analytics platform delivers insights as well as social ROI metrics using a dashboard-driven platform. Marketers use the platform to measure and gain the maximum value from Facebook Likes, understand their visitors; shopping, sharing, interests and influence, as well as identify their most impactful brand advocates.
Additional products Echo Engage and Echo Convert drive conversions and profitability by leveraging social data to deliver dynamic, personal messages and offers to website visitors. The Voxsup Facebook Ad Buying Platform targets users based on interests and connections, allowing clients to reach the users who are most likely to engage with a brand, efficiently driving conversions and likes.
Founder’s Story
I founded The Echo System in 2010 because I saw a gap in intelligence between the tools used for the web and the social web. I knew many companies were frustrated by the lack of real measurement available for social campaigns, and thought it would be empowering to develop these tools. My background was in digital marketing, and I wanted to focus on social media as it became standard for companies to promote themselves through social channels in order to stay competitive.
Prior to founding the company I worked in digital media at PHD, where I planned and invested nearly $400 million in media spend. I also co-founded Resolution Media, which I helped take from a startup to a sale to Omnicom and its eventual status as a $250 million agency. I hold a BS in Advertising from the University of Illinois and an MBA with honors in e-Business from DePaul University.
Marketing/Promotion Strategy
Our marketing strategy is tied to ensuring our platform offers real value to clients. As we continue to prove to our clients that a return on investment for social engagement can be measured and is a driver for growth, we develop a longer-term commitment and considerable word of mouth interest in our services.
We also created Echo Rank, which measures how the world’s top ecommerce brands turn social into sales. The Echo Rank scores Internet Retailer’s Top 500 companies in three areas: user engagement, social integration, and website performance. The final index identifies the companies performing best across all three areas and effectively driving return on social.
We are also closing our Series A funding round which will provide additional capital for marketing efforts.
How We Differentiate from the Competition
In a directly competitive fashion we don’t see anyone doing exactly what we offer. We see ourselves as a key part of the new social tech ecosystem and look at other players as potential partners instead of straight competitors.
We do see many social technologies that don’t look at how users should be engaged. They just jump right in and try to force the engagement, which we call ‘engagement for engagement’s sake.’ Our process is different. We begin by measuring and gathering analytics and insights and developing an understanding about the user before presenting the clients with how we can work together to increase our clients’ efficiency and profitability.
Business Model
Our analytics platform is offered to clients for free, so we garner revenue from our other products and services that integrate with and are branched off from our analytics. These revenue-generating features include website plugins, ad buying, and enterprise-level data integrations. Our website plugins are tools that are driving engagement and conversions by personalizing user experiences. These are structured as a combination of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)-related monthly fees and pay-for-performance models. Our ad buying for Facebook is better informed through our social analytics and is available through nominal management fees and a percentage of the media buy. With our data integrations, we can seamlessly import our user profile data into large scale CRM or ESP databases on a per-project basis.
Current Needs
We’re always looking for talented engineers who have experience with programs such as .NET, C# or JavaScript. We are also are currently closing our Series A round of funding which will enable our continued growth in several markets.
Echo System – www.theechosystem.com
