TechBytes with Emre Yenilmis, Chief Product Officer at Influenster

Emre Yenilmis
Chief Product Officer at Influenster

Brands are increasingly relying on user-generated content (UGC) to communicate with their audiences. Earlier this month, Influenster launched a short-form video reviews feature that let users upload text and image-based reviews as 60-second videos. With new guidelines on social media marketing coming into force, it is imperative for marketers to utilize compliance tools for data capture and monitor. We spoke to Emre Yenilmis, Chief Product Officer at Influenster, to understand how AI/ML and emerging technologies impact social media, influencer marketing and B2B social selling.

MTS: Tell us about your team and the technology you use for collaboration at Influenster?
Emre Yenilmis: We have a team of 20 employees in our tech team and we use a couple of tools to collaborate including Slack, JIRA, and Basecamp.

MTS: Tell us how The Real-Time Disclosure Monitor helps social media marketers and influencers comply with FTC guidelines?
Emre: At Influenster, we’ve always made social compliance a priority in all of our campaigns and communications. So The Real-Time Disclosure Monitor was a natural extension of our efforts – to hold our clients and members to the highest standards of disclosure in social influencer marketing.

The Real-Time Disclosure Monitor conducts a live data capture of user-generated content (UGC) created as part of brand campaigns and offers compliance checks in real time based on customized algorithms. Machine Learning is used to detect language sentiment in each social post and definitively identify disclosure. On top of that, Influenster has full-time staff support to manage the compliance of social posts generated by members. This combination of scalable machine learning and human accuracy ensures that social posts that are part of campaigns adhere to proper norms for disclosure.

MTS: With the changing dynamic of customer data and conversion analytics, how do you see social compliance tools evolving by 2020?
Emre: With social compliance becoming more of an imperative than ever before, agencies and marketers are going to be in tune with development technologies that offer clear solutions for proper disclosure. Much like how Instagram paved the way for the clear identification of sponsored posts, more social platforms will follow suit to offer native features allowing content creators to disclose their relationship with brands in social posts clearly. I would say that this would all come to play by 2018, not even 2020.

MTS: How does the analytic reporting on social media posts differ from that of a branded content hosted on a website or mobile apps?
Emre: For Influenster, when we report on the performance of social media posts or branded content on our website/app, the top thing we analyze and communicate to brands are the engagement rates measured by social actions taken – meaning social shares, comments, and likes. There isn’t currently a specific analytic reporting tool for The Real-Time Disclosure Monitor. The monitor works to programmatically identify non-compliant posts. Members are then notified that they are in violation of FTC guidelines and are advised to correct their social posts. A feedback loop is created to ensure that members are given the right prompts to respond with immediate correction and are given additional prompts about disclosure in the next campaign that they are in.

MTS: Wouldn’t it help if content marketers and influencers could do A/B testing for their posts if they meet FTC guidelines? Does The Real-Time Disclosure Monitor provide any such provisions or planning to provide such a feature in the coming?
Emre: We don’t offer any provisions for A/B testing to see how posts would perform with and without disclosure since meeting FTC guidelines is always our number one priority. Honesty is always the best policy…when transparency comes first, engagement will follow.

MTS: How do you see AI/ML capabilities empowering technology innovators to create a ubiquitous platform for social media, influencer, and B2B marketing/selling?
Emre: AI/ML capabilities will help to contextualize digital conversations across the board. Consumers will have a much clearer discernment of the relationships between content creators and brands in social posts, hence also building a bridge between content creators and consumers. Also, scaleable curation will enable content, ads, and the online discovery process to become increasingly customized and tailored to each user’s needs and interests.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Emre.
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