Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr (Part 1)

This conversation delves into the whitespaces in Content Marketing that AI enables.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Grapevine6.

Mike Orr: I’m the CEO and one of the co-founders of Grapevine6. It’s a content engagement platform to enable salespeople, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to engage their networks in social and digital channels with relevant content. 

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me with a bit of a use case so that we get to a more visceral understanding of what you do and how you do what you do. 

Mike Orr: We found that in a number of our customers, Grapevine6 enables their salespeople to engage their networks in social channels and use it to either drive sales or drive relationships. For entrepreneurs, it helps to build their networks.

The biggest challenge that they have in driving adoption in those programs is that there is not enough relevant content coming from marketing to help them grow and to start conversations.

What we do is apply AI to find the 10 or 20 most relevant content to your personal brand from hundreds of thousands of materials published on the web. It’s going to differentiate you from the entrepreneur down the street, the salesperson sitting next door, or maybe the financial advisor in your firm because you are going to get the same corporate content.

If you are working with a firm, how are you going to differentiate yourself in the market and build an authentic conversation with your audience? You do that by finding third party content. We automate that through the use of AI to enable it to be delivered through an app that shows those recommendations. It makes it easy to schedule it out to get posted to your networks. 

Sramana Mitra: Can we do a use case? Take me through a customer and show me exactly how this would work in the customer context. 

Mike Orr: One of our largest customers is SAP. Their global salesforce is highly engaged in digital selling and a big part of that is social selling. They are using Sales Navigator to engage with their prospects and their current accounts.

They are also using it to research them before they reach out to them. They also connect with them there. They need to regularly post content to their profile to create some activity and also be engaged in the network.

Sramana Mitra: When you said profile, are you talking about a LinkedIn profile?  

Mike Orr: Yes, they also use Twitter and other social channels. Each of them has a Grapevine6 account. I’m in cloud computing and I’m selling SAP’s latest solutions for cloud computing, they are going to get content delivered to them that is relevant to cloud computing and the advances that are happening there.

They can select the articles that are the most relevant, perhaps from Tech Crunch or Forbes. They can also add their commentary. We recommend this because you’re borrowing someone’s content, so you want to add your perspective to that and translate why that piece is relevant to your network and how your thinking is affected by that piece of content.

You add your commentary, schedule that, and post it out. You can also engage with other people’s content on LinkedIn or other social networks. You are going to invite commentary, discussion, and you are going to invite people to engage with that content.

We report that back so that you can see what content is resonating with my audience. That’s our personal brand building use case. We can also direct the technology to a specific profile and you could research someone for a meeting. Or, if you are trying to restart a conversation, you can try to find a specific actionable way to add value to that individual and to that conversation.

We had seen how brands were changing the way they were engaging consumers in conversations. It was about adding value before asking for value. Sales has changed its approach to be able to do that. We analyze the LinkedIn profile or web page with their bio and recommend content that would be relevant to that specific individual.

You can then compose a message and say, “I saw this article, I find it really interesting. Here’s my commentary or my take on how this is important.” Then send that through email or any other digital channel you want. That’s the more one-to-one directed case. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Grapevine6 CEO Mike Orr
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