A big part of what we do here at FunnelAmplified is the creation, evolution and maintenance of our technology platform. Understanding the tech can go a long way towards understanding the power behind Funnel Amplification. We want to start shining a light on our technology, as well as on the brilliant minds who power it.
This week, our Director of Technology, Daniel Willems, sat down and wrote up a brief explanation of our platform, from a technological viewpoint, as well as a description of what sort of tech work goes into maintaining the FunnelAmplified platform.
My name is Daniel Willems and I work at FunnelAmplified. It is (what I consider) to be a tech company. I do a mix of things, but they are almost all tech related. This means most of my time is spent alone figuring out problems. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy this, but it is good to stop and step back and look at what you are building and the users using it…you know as humans.
So with this in mind I am going to start writing about cool things we are doing at FunnelAmplified. Also it gives me a chance to use our product.
These posts will usually have a tech slant, but will hopefully do a few things:
- Give you an overview on what we just deployed or are wrapping up now
- Maybe a taste of what is on the horizon
- I am hoping that we can shed some light on the inner workings that make this platform a cool solution for tons of markets, all without giving away too much of the secret sauce.
What is FunnelAmplified?
FunnelAmplified is one-for-many marketing with word-of-mouth delivery.
What does that mean?
Well we give teams large and small the ability to push messaging out to their members. This is done through two main avenues: Brand-Hubs and Social Ambassadors.
BrandHubs
We have built a system that lets users setup a personalized Brand-Hub in minutes.
A Brand-Hub is pretty much a personalized website or mini-site. There are a variety of templates to pick from and colors and content can be customized. However, the basic setup really only takes a few minutes.
Once the Brand-Hub is set up, a user can start posting from our system or schedule posts to go out on a timely basis. The real power comes in when the marketing admin, or the person who is responsible for creating marketing content for a company, can post current content to an indefinite Brand-Hubs at the same time. Thus, their team no longer has to worry about posting regularly to have current content on his or her site. We have the tools to handle SEO questions so don’t worry about that.
Social Ambassadors
I get SEO, but let’s face it: if you post something on a blog no one will ever see it. But, if you post a picture of your last meal on a social network you might get 100 likes and even more views. Therefore we can say that no one will probably read your post unless you or someone else shares it. In fact you reading this right now probably land into one of those two categories.
What this means is that being seen comes through word of mouth, and word of mouth comes from sharing with the people you know. Social Ambassadors make it easy for marketers to utilize word of mouth throughout their teams entire social networks.
We have many teams who just use Social Ambassadors to send posts out to hundreds of members social networks at the same time, or at scattered times due to their size. Where as in the past they told their team, “Hey please share this. it is important that people hear about our new widgets.”
Now the marketing admin can send out suggested messaging in a timely manner to the team. I personally always edited suggested posts from our team to present it in a way that I would say it. It makes the message actually come from me instead of through me.
Watch this video to see how Social Ambassadors can amplify your message.
In Conclusion
Ok so that, being as brief and broad as possible, is what we do. Feel free to ask me any questions about it. Really, what it means from a tech standpoint is that we have to integrate with a variety of APIs, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, managing all of their changes and requirements. We constantly need to be able to scale resources and deploy multiple code bases on AWS as required, and new versions of our mobile app to Apple iTunes and Google Play.
Magically creating dynamic links, sites on demand and juggling numerous endpoints which all leads to some interesting problems and solutions.
