Marketing’s war with social media rages on. In one corner, you have the Twitterverse—a temperamental beast that never sleeps, is always hungry, and changes shape on a minute-by-minute basis. In the other corner are community managers, marketers, and every possible noun you can affix to ‘social media’ (ninja, maven, expert, dilettante, etc.)
The two contenders meet in the middle every day, attempting to best each other. But excepting the occasional Oreo-Super-Bowl type of triumph, the latter group rarely wins. What could possibly defeat our robot overlords? Another robot, obviously.
Meshfire is Hootsuite meets HAL, a social media management platform that thinks it knows what’s best for you. Ember, its core intelligence, uses machine learning as its base and layers on the advice of human social media experts to recommend the best content for Twitter posts. It examines your network and then recommends who to connect with and what conversations to join.
CMO Amber Osborne and CEO Eli Israel created Meshfire with the small business in mind, those companies over-served by full-fledged suites like Spredfast but frustrated by the lack of features on Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.
To recommend influencers, Ember takes into account Klout scores, interest topics, frequency of interaction, and those who converse rather than broadcast (Ember would hate me). So far, the ideal clients have been video game companies like 3D Realms, who deal with a large amount of social media volume in their communities. (I can’t help but guess what sort of recommendations Ember was making during GamerGate.)
Logging into Meshfire for the first time presents you with a task board as it ingests your tweets. Ember recommended people to block – most of which I agreed with, though one was a close friend – and people to follow (only @meshfire so far). It also recommended logical accounts to connect with, like Bitly, Feedly, and Buffer. Overall, it provided a decent intro to a new product, although time will tell how smart Ember really is in directing me.
When Ember does work well, it can allow a company to react to high-profile tweets from a mass of volume. During a large PR push around the Kickstarter for its game Obduction, Cyan Inc. was receiving too many incoming tweets to process them all, much less react. But when Neil Patrick Harris tweeted at them, Ember brought a taskcard to the top of Cyan’s taskboard, allowing for an immediate response.
The biggest obstacle for Meshfire is its competitive landscape. In addition to Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Sprout, there are also up and comers like Bottlenose, created by the progenitor of data geekness Nova Spivack, and Dataminr, whose strategic partnership with Twitter includes real-time access to all public tweets. Meshfire’s “do this, then this, then that” approach seems more targeted to the social media commoner, though, of which there are legion.