GoDaddy influencer scoring with Nimble

GoDaddy, which in recent years has pivoted away from being a domain registrar and web hosting company to one with aspirations to provide all the digital infrastructure that a startup or SMB is likely to need, is using Nimble as part of its quest to prospect for potential community advocates. Here's how.

Influencer scoring

GoDaddy has an outreach marketing team that endeavors to discover micro-vertical markets where there are opportunities to provide services. Heather Dopson, who is a Community Builder at GoDaddy explains:

We developed a proprietary score card that we call an influencer index score with different points of information in it. Just to be clear, when I'm talking about influencers in this capacity I'm not talking about celebrity endorsements or anything like that, I'm talking about micro-influencers. People who have a community in which they have a vested interest for success, and someone with whom we can build a relationship to help them and their community succeed.

That might include people who are helping others with adjacencies - hair stylists to use the makeup artist example - or website developers who specialize in micro-verticals.

As we know for ourselves, the discovery and assessment process for assessing influencers is far from easy, is not an exact science and can easily be subject to biases. GoDaddy overcomes some of the inherent issues by using a continually iterating process it applies to score both external influencers and internal advocates who are - or wish to become - influencers in their own right.

It's just like anything you do on social, what we were doing and how we were thinking six months ago is not what we need to be doing right now. It just doesn't work the same.

Source of truth

As we've noted before, Nimble is almost platform like in the sense you can approach it from a variety of angles. So where does Nimble fit into this particular use case?

We call it our source of truth for keeping track of and documenting influencers. Let's take our top 25 employees based on the score that we've given them as an example. We can sort those top 25 employees so that when there is an upcoming event we can readily see who is going to be a right fit.

When attending an event, an employee will have certain KPIs that are conversational in nature. That data is captured and goes towards the next score assessment.

I think keeping track of, if this person went to an event what was their performance like, or what are their specific skills? We may have somebody whose better suited to go to a WordPress event, than to go to a small business event, or vice-versa, so keeping track of all that information in there is a vital part of the decision process.

Nimble as a research tool

Beyond that, the team also use Nimble as a research tool. For instance, Nimble can tell the team the number of influencer followers on Instagram and Twitter along with their topics of expertise.

Before I go to an event, I will use Nimble to discover people that may have in the database who are in that area. They may not be participating in the particular event or even be associated with that event's content, but the information we already have helps determine whether there is value in making a face to face connection as part of relationship development.

When assessing an individual account, Dopson is clear that engagement matters. In her view, it is not enough that a person has a strong following or is pushing out interesting information.

We value the conversations we see occurring because they tell us a great deal about a person's ability to make connections and both advocate and encourage. We see those traits as vital to find people who are passionate community builders.

Assessing social

As we were discussing this topic, I wondered how GoDaddy is navigating the social world at a time when major networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming closed off, walled gardens and where Twitter is a place where you are either engaging with like-minded people (that seems to be most these days) or actively finding others who are curious.

Dopson agreed that it is 'constant topic of discussion' but says Twitter activity around events remains incredibly useful, especially when it is captured inside Nimble. I'd agree with that for some events but the mega-events are not as easy to parse as smaller events, largely because the signal to noise ratio often plummets. However, I can see that by restricting conversation capture to contacts already inside the Nimble system provides a clear value.

Reporting as a differentiator

I was aware going into our conversation that Dopson has experience of a variety of CRM and marketing automation products but I was curious to know why Nimble stood out.

I love Nimble because of its simplicity to use, but also its robust capability. I think that it is a tool that everybody is capable of using, and should be using. Apart from flexible capabilities, especially from a reporting aspect,the price point is phenomenal

Asked to elaborate on reporting, Dopson said that GoDaddy is able to sort across multiple dimensions that make up the influencer score alongside the Top XX influencers. this allows users to get granular insights into topics of interest. In the long term, Dopson hopes that GoDaddy will be able to use Nimble as a way of discovering the influencer equivalent of marketing hot leads, the up and comers that it believes are critical to community building.

Advice for others

In closing, I was interested in getting Dopson's advice for others because one problem we perceive at diginomica is the possibility of becoming overwhelmed with what Nimble can deliver. That's not a unique problem but one that requires careful handling.

I think it's important to have a base understanding of what your goals are in the tool, meet those first, and then as you discover more functionality inside the tool, or you discover more needs for your information, learn how to use the tool to shape the next steps. As I said earlier, Nimble is very easy to pick up but it is evolving rapidly and so we believe it's important to get proper training.

My take

We've been playing with Nimble for a while developing use cases that are similar to that described by Dopson so we are keenly aware of the challenges she describes. Sharing those experiences proved valuable because they allowed me to expand my thinking about what a CRM should be like in a socially moderated world.