The Easiest Way to Activate Your Employees in Social Media With Bambu

Welcome back to Marketing Marvels! I’m joined today by Sprout Social’s Greg Tirico, who also heads up an amazing new product called Bambu.
Organic social reach is getting tougher, and content creation is happening faster than ever. Competing for your audience’s attention is no easy feat. Many marketers are turning to strategies like paid social or influencer marketing to get seen, but Bambu does something a little different: It makes brand advocates out of your employees.
Bambu eliminates the friction that so often accompanies employee advocacy, taking the guesswork out of knowing what to share and when. From Bambu’s dashboard, administrators can offer employees a “river” of hand-picked media, suggest status updates, and curate team-specific posts. Best of all? You can try it for free with a team of between 20 and 100 employees.
Watch the video for Greg’s demo, and learn more about what Bambu can do for your team.

Jay: Hey, everybody. It is Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Welcome to another episode of Marketing Marvels, the show where I bring to you really cool marketing technology that you, the smart marketer, should think about adopting in your organization. Every show has a demo that you should be paying attention to, really cool software. We talk about the company and talk about why it is interesting.
Today, we have a really special guest. I’m excited about this. My friend Greg Tirico from Sprout Social joins us on Marketing Marvels. Greg is in charge of advocacy solutions there and heads up a product called BAMBU, which is spelled B-A-M-B-U.
Thanks very much for being on the show.
Greg: Thank you very much, Jay. It’s always a pleasure.
Jay: Here’s why I wanted to have you on the show and have you show Marketing Marvels fans BAMBU. We all know that organic social reach is getting tougher, but everybody is making more and more content. You have this alignment problem. More content, less attention, Uh-oh. So what do we do?
Well, lots of people are turning to paid social, and rightfully so, and other forms of paid. Other people are thinking, “Well, maybe the secret here is influencer marketing,” and potentially, it is at some level. We have a podcast called Influence Pros that talks all about that.
But really, the very best influencers you have are sitting right next to you in your organization. If your employees aren’t your best influencers, if your employees aren’t your best advocates, you don’t have a marketing problem. You probably have a hiring problem.
There are lots and lots of employee-advocacy software packages out there, many that I’m familiar with, maybe some that you’re familiar with, but here’s the challenge. A lot of them, I think, are too complicated. They have too many whistles and bells. I’m like, “Where do I click?”
Here’s the thing. Here’s the real truth. The people in your organization, who you want to have be part of your advocacy program, you want them to Tweet your stuff and Facebook your stuff and LinkedIn your stuff because it’s going to get more eyeballs or earholes on your content, that’s great, but you know what? They already have a day job. They already have a job in engineering or sales or customer service or maintenance or supply-chain management or whatever. They’re not professional marketers.
So if your employee advocacy solution isn’t super, crazy simple and doesn’t scale with ease, it’s going to fall out of favor. It’s going to die on the vine.
That’s what I love about BAMBU. It makes it super hassle-free for employees who are not in marketing to participate in social sharing. After all, if you don’t have participation, none of this is going to work. I love the product. It has an unbelievable user interface, as you’re about to see in just a second. I’m a big, big fan. Greg, you and your team have done an amazing job on this.
Guys, here’s the deal. BAMBU is free for you to try if you have between 20 and 100 participating employees. You can have as many employees in your company as you want, but if you can get 20 to 100 of them to actually try BAMBU as a team or as a cohort or as segment or as a club or whatever, go get 20 to 100 of your friends in your organization and be like, “You know what? We’re going to try this.” They’ll give it to you for free for a bit to check it out, and you will be glad that you did. You’re going to figure that out in just a second when you see this demo.
Greg, thanks again for being here. Congratulations on the great work on BAMBU. What did I miss? What did I overlook in my preview here?
Greg: Thank you, Jay. Those were kind words. I almost couldn’t have said it better myself. Typically, when someone asks me to give them a 30-second rundown on BAMBU, I focus on a couple of things. I focus on ease of use, and I focus on the need to drive employee adoption through that ease of use.
You said it quite well. Not every employee is a marketer. Not every employee has a bunch of spare time sitting around waiting for you to roll out an advocacy program to them. That ease of use really plays as a critical component regarding an advocacy program and that kind of engagement and participation levels that you see in an organization.
Jay: Fantastic. Do you want to give us a peek of it?
Greg: Yeah, I’d love to.
Jay: Check it out.
Greg: Do you want to do a demo?
Jay: Yeah, let’s do a demo. As he fires it up, I want to remind you to go to getbambu.com/pricing. That’s getbambu.com/pricing. It should be down here on the screen as well. Go to getbambu.com/pricing to figure out how you can get the free trial.
All right, here we go, boom. Look at this.
Greg: This is BAMBU. What I’m doing right now is I’m showing you what the typical employee sees. We’re going to walk through a couple of components today. We’ll look at what the typical employee sees, and then we’ll move into the program administration components.
For a typical employee, as we mentioned before, we want this to be really simple. I like to say that there is a fairly large gap between your employees’ willingness to share information in the social media space and the act of sharing information in the social media space. All along the line there, the reason you see falloff is because there are multiple points of friction. What BAMBU seeks to do is remove that friction.
As an employee, when I log in, either for the first time or for the fiftieth time, this is what I see. There’s very minimal navigation running down the left-hand side, and my eyes go immediately to the stories that are running down the center of the screen.
These stories have been brought in by program administrators, be it marketing representatives, HR representatives, or sales leaders inside of your organization. You’ve got a team of people, in the background, who are bringing stories into BAMBU and making them available for employees to read and then to share.
Jay: And so . . .
Greg: Go ahead.
Jay: I was just going to say it’s really easy to see what’s on there. Is that just sort of a waterfall, and things just get added to that list like you’d see on Facebook, for example?
Greg: It is, yes. It’s a waterfall of stories, first in, first out, controlled by the administrator.
Jay: And if you have something important like, “Hey, big company news. We won an award,” or whatever, I suspect you can pin something to the top?
Greg: Yes, you can. It’s called a featured story. You can make it available at the top, and by featuring a story, it stays at the top. It doesn’t fall down. It also gets a little bit more screen real estate inside of some of the email digests that we’re sending out of BAMBU.
Jay: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point that all the stories that you add over a seven-day period automatically get sent out to users in email. They get an email once a week that says, “Here’s all the stuff that has been added that you may not have seen.”
Greg: That’s correct. You can set the digest stuff to go out daily or weekly. For many organizations, daily is probably a little overwhelming. That’s fair. So let’s assume that you set it up for a weekly digest. You pick the day, you pick the time, you pick the time zone, all that good stuff, and then those top stories go out to your employees once a week.
Jay: Which is really interesting because, while this is certainly an employee advocacy social sharing platform at heart, you could also use it as, essentially, a replacement for your internal email newsletter.
You can say, “Okay. We’re going to put the stories here on the web, and if you want to check every day, here’s cool stuff you should know just because we think you should know it. If you want to share it, great.” But then it also has the automatic email digest, which kind of replaces the, “Hey, y’all, here’s something you ought to pay attention to,” email.
Greg: That’s so true. I’ve written blog posts about this. Other team members have written blog posts about this. Replacing the corporate email newsletter is something that we feel strongly about in terms of the use of BAMBU. You absolutely can do that. You hit on one of the critical pieces of BAMBU in the way that we send out emails and generate them.
Other items that come to mind are press clippings, press reports, right? What’s a summary of all the press clips for the week? The PR team is already doing that. Why not use BAMBU to facilitate that and make it a little more automated.
Jay: Yeah, that’s really smart. What happens if I click one of these stories? Do I leave BAMBU and go to the web? How does that work?
Greg: I’ll click on one of these stories. This one is interesting to me. We’ll go down here. We’ll pick one. There we go. Here’s one from an individual that I work with. His name is Patrick Cuttica. He’s one of the product managers inside of Sprout Social.
By clicking on the story, I’m now in a reader mode, and I can read this story in its entirety inside of BAMBU. It looks beautiful, and what you’ll notice is that we’re even pulling in and supporting the animated GIFs that are part of the blog post that we pulled into the platform.
At the very top, I’m going to see a picture of the individual that brought the story in. It’s very personalized. I know Patrick Cuttica. I work with him. I respect him. I’m interested in the information that he puts in front of me, and he’s left me a little note up here. It’s an internal only note. It cannot be accidentally shared externally when you’re sharing this as a status update, and he’s helped to set some context for me around why this story is interesting.
Jay: Yeah, why you should care.
Greg: Why should you read it? What’s that?
Jay: Why should you care? Exactly.
Greg: Yeah, why do I care? What’s in it for me? That’s what you’re doing with this note at the very top.
Then I’m going to scroll down a little bit, and you’ll see that this link that we brought into BAMBU in its entirety is available to be read inside of BAMBU. I don’t need to leave the BAMBU environment in order to get a full sense for what this story is telling me.
At any point in time, if I’m interested in sharing this story, we can share to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I’m going to choose to share it to Twitter, and something pretty cool happens.
This is a status update box. We’re probably all used to seeing one of these. What I like about what Patrick did when he brought this story into BAMBU is that he gave me an enormous head start by writing a status update for me. You can write one suggested status update. You can write multiple suggested status updates for your employee participants inside of this platform.
Jay, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read something really cool on the internet. I think, “I want to share this with the world.” I write a little bit of a status update and say, “No, that’s not what I want to write.” I try a second time. “No, that’s not what I want.” By the time I get to the third time, I’ve given up. I’ve moved on. I’ve got other things to do.
I’ve read a great piece of information. I’ve internalized it, but I have not shared what I’ve learned with the world because of that point of friction, and that’s one of the points of friction that I referenced a little bit earlier. I don’t know where to start. Just give me a head start, and that’s what we do with our default status updates.
What I love about this is that, in particular, for this one, I have @ references, and I have suggested hashtags as well. I could lightly edit this if I’d like to, but I don’t have to.
Jay: That’s so great with the hashtags. A lot of times, people who are not in marketing forget to use hashtags. They wouldn’t know which ones to use, and they don’t really care that much. So the fact that you can serve those up inside the status update, then they can use them if you want to is really, that’s like . . .
Greg: What you’ll see a little bit later on is that you can suggest status updates for Twitter that have hashtags, and you can suggest status updates for LinkedIn that do not have hashtags, because LinkedIn knows nothing of hashtags.
Jay: Yeah, that’s great. You can obviously click the Tweet button, and it will send it out through your account. Obviously, we won’t show this in a demo, but when an employee signs up for BAMBU, they authenticate their social account so that it will share, etc.
Greg: They do, yes.
Jay: If I click Send Later, I get a social scheduler, then?
Greg: You do, yes. You can schedule something to send it out later, or you can Tweet it out immediately. It’s your choice.
For example, as an employee of Sprout Social, I go into BAMBU once a week, typically on Mondays when I’m getting my week started. I look at all the stories that have been made available to me to read and share, and I’ll schedule five, six, seven things out during the course of the week, knowing that I’ll be using Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook natively during the week as well.
I want to keep my profiles alive with conversation and engagement with people that I care about, and that’s why the @ references in here and the hashtags are pretty critical to me when I’m scheduling things out. BAMBU supports both. You can schedule something for later, or you can Tweet it out immediately.
Jay: If I Tweet it, do I still see it in my river, or does it disappear?
Greg: That’s a great question. Once I’ve Tweeted this story right here, it disappears from the river. I’ve already acted on it, and it falls into the shared area over on the left-hand side.
Jay: Oh, cool. So it shows what you’ve actually shared. It’s almost like a bookmarking feature.
Greg: Yeah.
Jay: If I like it enough to share it, we’ll keep it over here. That’s cool.
Greg: Yes, you’ve got it. For the employee, it’s a personal historical archive of everything that they’ve shared inside of BAMBU.
Jay: Nice. And then “Scheduled,” of course, are the things that you’ve scheduled down the road.
Greg: You’ve got it. If I schedule things out for the week and I want to see what’s fired and what has not, or I want to pause scheduling on a particular story because it’s no longer relevant, whatever it is, you can go into Scheduled and see everything that’s queued up and ready to go.
Jay: The share count that you have there, that’s shares from within BAMBU, not total shares of the content anywhere in the world.
Greg: That’s correct. It’s admin configurable. If you want to show that to your employees because you feel like they’d like to know which stories are the most popular . . .
Jay: An internal social kind of thing. Cool. How does this river get populated? How do those stories appear there?
Greg: Great question. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to flip from the employee view, and we’re going to move into the admin view. Are you ready for that, Jay?
Jay: Absolutely, yeah.
Greg: All right, as we move into the admin view, what you’re going to notice is that BAMBU is not markedly different for an admin compared to your typical employee. Yeah, thank you. The reading and sharing experience is exactly the same. As an admin, I can participate in this platform just like your typical employee can.
Jay: So if you’re an admin, you don’t have two logins. You just have the one login, and you can both share and create.
Greg: Yeah, you’ve got it.
Jay: That’s cool. It makes sense.
Greg: A little bit easier, right? What is different between the admin and the typical employee is primarily the navigation items running down the left-hand side.
As an admin, I have “Current”. These are stories that are currently available for employees to share. I have “Upcoming”. When you bring a story into the platform, you can set a start date, and if you set the start date for some point in the future, it means that story will not be available for employees to share.
They’ll have no knowledge of it until the start date becomes today and then it becomes available for them.
Every story has a start date and an end date. The end date would cause a story to fall into the past. It’s great for time-bound events like webinars and trade shows. For example, I’d hate for an employee at Sprout Social, if this were a live event and we were only doing it live and not recording it, to Tweet tomorrow, “Join Jay Baer and Greg Tirico for a podcast.”
Jay: Yeah.
Greg: Well, it’s gone, right?
Jay: Yeah.
Greg: So that’s why the start date and the end date are useful. “Drafts” is a lot like email drafts. You can start adding a story to the platform. You might have a question about it. You can save it as a draft, and you don’t lose your work.
That leads us to your question. How do you get a story into the platform? A story can be brought into the platform from a link on the internet. I actually pulled up a site here called Convince & Convert a little bit earlier. You’ve heard of them, right?
Jay: I have.
Greg: Okay. I’m going to add one of your posts. I click “Add New Story”, and then I paste your link into BAMBU. Our parser goes out, and it does its thing.
We do have a Chrome extension that you can do this with. I find that there are two kinds of people in the world – those that have Chrome extensions and use them on a very regular basis and those that know nothing of browser extensions.
Jay: Sure.
Greg: If you’re a person that likes browser extensions, you can do this inside of the page that you want to curate, and if not, you can just come into BAMBU and do it. Those two features are at parity with each other, so it’s really personal preference.
This is the “Add New Story” window. At the very top is the URL that I brought in. This URL is editable, which means you can add or modify UTM tracking parameters that are on this URL. If you wanted to change the source to BAMBU, you could do that, and then you can shorten the link using either our bit.ly integration or your bit.ly account, if connected.
Below that, we have an image that we can change. We detect images on the page, and we allow you to scroll through them. You can also add one from your desktop. You can also edit the title, and you can edit the description, all so that you create a really great experience for your participating employees.
I mentioned that note that Mr. Cuttica had left for me, setting context and telling me why I would be interested in sharing something. This is where you include that note, and then below that is where you include the status updates.
If I want to add multiple status updates, one just for Twitter, so I turn Facebook and LinkedIn off, one just for LinkedIn, and one for Facebook and LinkedIn. You can see how I toggled those icons. Inside of here, you can write status updates.
We’ll track for you the total number of characters that are allowed, given the networks that you’ve selected. If it’s a combination of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, we’re still going to limit you to 116 [sounds like 00:16:04] because you’ve said, “I want this particular status update to be available for those two networks.”
So you’ve got a lot of choices here.
I would like to call out the compliance issues that we have built in, because they’re pretty important. We want our employees who are participating, in BAMBU, to be authentic with their voice. We want them to be genuine. We don’t want them to be robots, not at all. That’s not what we’re after here.
But let’s say, for example, we have a really good financial quarter. We want our employees talking about it, but we also know at the same time that we only want them saying one very specific thing about our financial results.
In that case then, you can lock the suggested status updates so that employees cannot edit them. They either have to send it as-is, or they don’t send at all.
It’s a really helpful compliance feature.
Jay: It’s so simple, too. You just click the one lock. That’s awesome.
Greg: That’s it, done.
Jay: That’s really easy.
Greg: Getting down to the bottom here, this is the start date and the end date that we referenced a little bit earlier.
Jay: Yes.
Greg: One of the features that I love inside of BAMBU is called “Teams.” That’s at the very bottom of the screen here right now. Teams allows you to target stories at teams of employees.
If I want employees just from, for example, the BAMBU sales team to see something inside of BAMBU, I can target them. Now, only employees who are in the BAMBU sales team will see this story, when I bring it into the environment.
For those that are either listening or watching this, you’re familiar with Convince & Convert. You’re marketers. You do not suffer from a lack of content. The danger here is that if you put every piece of content in front of every employee, you’re going to overwhelm all of your employees.
Jay: Yeah, you’re going to . . . Absolutely.
Greg: You can use the Teams feature to target employees with very specific stories and very specific messaging associated with those stories.
Jay: And you can have multiple teams, I presume, in there?
Greg: Oh, yeah. Employees can live in multiple teams, and you can have multiple teams. You could target multiple teams on one post and employees can live in multiple teams.
Of course, we’re smart enough to know that if an employee is in the customer care team and the design team, they’ll only see this story once inside of that waterfall of stories. We’re smart enough to understand that.
Jay: Nice.
Greg: Yeah.
Jay: If you are an employee, maybe you’re on the design team, and you happen to see a post out there somewhere on the internet, and you’re like, “This is rad. We should share this with everybody else,” is there a way for the employee to then add content to BAMBU or add it to an administrator to say, “Hey, you should consider putting this in there?” Is there a process for that somehow?
Greg: Yeah, that’s a great question, Jay. There is a process for that. We actually have a security structure inside of BAMBU that I’ll show to you right now. That security structure allows you to deputize employees so that they can take additional actions above and beyond just what we refer to as the reader role.
If you look on this chart that I have on the screen at the “contributor” role, you can see that the contributor is effectively a deputized employee. They can draft content, and then admins and managers can review it.
That was an awesome question. Thank you.
Jay: That’s really smart. You’ve got those people who are just super-fans. They read a lot, and they’re super into blogs or podcasts or whatever, and they’re always flagging stuff. They’re the people who, without BAMBU, are sending emails to everybody else in the organization saying, “Hey, check this out.”
Greg: Yes.
Jay: You can just go to your inbox, and anybody whose subject line was, “Check this out,” that’s your contributor.
Greg: Exactly.
Jay: That’s the exact person.
Greg: You’ve got it.
Jay: As an admin or manager, you can set up the teams and figure all that out, add the content, and then you’ve got some reporting to see who actually read stuff, who shared stuff, etc.
Greg: Yeah, you sure do. The reporting is down here. We have three reports for you.
The general report is an overview report. What we’re looking at here is an overview of the performance of BAMBU, inside of your organization. There are a number of sections. It’s a pretty interactive report. You’ll hover over things and notice that there are tooltips.
You can also, for example, turn off the focus on Facebook and LinkedIn and just look at Twitter shares by network for a certain time period. As you go down, you’ll see a number of areas that we’re focusing on to give you an overview of how you are generally performing.
If you want to do a deep dive into how stories are performing inside of BAMBU, you can pull up the content report. When you pull up the content report, what you’ll see is that we’re giving you insight now, into how content is performing inside of the BAMBU environment.
Specifically, we can look at this piece of content and say, “All right, total number of shares.” We see it broken down by Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We see impressions broken down. Were any teams targeted in this particular instance? No. Who shared it? These individuals along with 35 others.
All of this data, by the way, is available to you via CSV. You’re not limited or locked in to what you see on the screen. You can pull this data into a CSV file and do any level of analysis that you’d like to.
The user report allows you to dive deep into the performance of your employees, not the performance of your content. If you wanted to call somebody out for being a part of a high-perming team, or if you wanted to call somebody out for being your highest performing individual, or if you wanted to call somebody out for being your lowest performing individual, I suppose you could do that as well. Inside of the user report, you could do a deep dive into the performance of your employees.
Those are our three reports, an overview report and then a deep dive into content and a deep dive into users. All of your data is exportable to CSV so that you can do some deep analysis on this stuff.
Jay: I love it. The notes that you add, when you create a new story, do those notes persist when I get the weekly digest email?
Greg: These notes right here persist when you send something called the “broadcast” email. There are two kinds of emails that BAMBU can send. One of them is the weekly digest, daily or weekly. Let’s just assume weekly right now. It’s a weekly digest. You set the time. You set the day. It automatically goes out all based on activity that your program administrators are doing inside of BAMBU by adding stories.
Let’s say, for example, you have that set to go out on a Tuesday, but then on Wednesday, something significant happens, and you want your employees to talk about it and know about it. You don’t want to wait until next Tuesday when that weekly digest goes out again.
That’s why we have the “broadcast” feature inside of BAMBU. You can broadcast an email to your employees about a particular story on an on-demand basis and leave a note for them here. That’s where you can bring that note across, and it will persist inside of their email inbox.
Jay: Nice. That’s great.
Greg: You can see down here, it says, “Will be sent to 242 people.” We respect team targeting when you’re doing broadcast emails, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Jay: That’s fantastic. One of the things I love about the platform as well, we talked about it at the very beginning in terms of ease of use, is how easy it is in mobile, too.
If you’re going to use BAMBU on a phone, and that’s, I think, a really likely use case for a lot of employees who are in the field or just typically use their phone as their primary method of internet access, the functionality is the same. You lose no functionality on mobile versus desktop or laptop, which is pretty remarkable.
This is the email on mobile?
Greg: Yeah, this is the email digest that appears on mobile. I’m just going to pick a story here inside of the email digest that I like so that we go out to the mobile environment for BAMBU.
The mobile environment for BAMBU is remarkable because it doesn’t require a particular kind of phone. Anybody can use the mobile environment. If you’re rolling this out to thousands or tens of thousands of employees, you want something – again, it’s all about points of friction – that has the lowest amount of friction possible.
Inside of that email digest, I tapped once on “Read Full Story”. This is the story that I tapped on. I’ll take my thumb, and I’ll scroll up. You can see here’s that note from Mr. Cuttica telling me why I’m interested in reading and sharing this story.
The entire story itself is available inline inside of the BAMBU environment, and then at any point in time, if I’m interested in sharing this story, in the lower right-hand corner, there’s an arrow coming out of a box. By tapping on that, I see I can share to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even generate an email.
If I choose to share via Twitter, I get this share box right here, and I can even schedule things out inside of the mobile environment. If I want to schedule something out for 6 p.m. on a Friday, schedule done. It’s really easy to use inside of a mobile environment.
I have to be honest . . .
Jay: That’s the same suggested Tweet that we saw before, right, with the hashtag and all that?
Greg: It sure is.
Jay: Yeah.
Greg: Yes, it sure is. Those suggested Tweets come over into the mobile environment.
I personally mostly use BAMBU inside of the mobile environment when I’m out and about. Your mileage may vary, though. Some people sit at a desk all day long, and they enjoy using the desktop environment. The fact that the mobile and the desktop environment are both so full-featured is a point of significant strength as far as I’m concerned.
Jay: Yeah, it’s really great. Fantastic. Anything else we didn’t get a chance to see?
Greg: Not much, Jay. We did a really, really quick demo here. We do talk about BAMBU having a desktop/laptop experience. We talked about it having a mobile experience as well as an email experience. We touched on all three of those today.
BAMBU is a great communications platform with a significant social sharing layer on top of it. Hopefully, your viewers have gotten a sense for how easy it is to use, primarily from an employee perspective, but also from an admin perspective.
Jay: Yeah.
Greg: I’m really happy to be a part of the team, and it’s been a lot of fun.
Jay: I know we said that if you go to getbambu.com/pricing, you can get a free trial if you’ve got between 20 and 100 participating employees. What does it cost to use this day to day? If I’m in. I want to use this for my team, what and how do you charge people?
Greg: Yeah, sure thing. We have a couple of plans.
We have our “launch plan,” which is for 125 employees, and that comes at an annual cost of $10,000 per year.
We have our “focus plan,” which is for 250 employees, and that comes at an annual cost of $16,000 per year.
Then we go up from there to another plan for 500 employees at an annual cost of $28,000 per year.
After 500 employees, we will write a custom agreement for you based on the number of employees that you want to bring into the platform.
Jay: Great. It sounds pretty simple. I love it. getbambu.com/pricing, to kick the tires on it yourself. We’ll turn off the screen share. I want to ask you a couple more questions before we get out of here.
Greg: Sure thing. Let me know when the screen share is off.
Jay: You’re good. I see you now.
Greg: All right.
Jay: I think you’re wearing a BAMBU shirt, are you not?
Greg: I am. I’m a little too low. The BAMBU shirt . . .
Jay: Working the brand, nice job. You are a smart guy. You know the business. You know technology. You know social. You know SaaS. Why are you here? Why are you at BAMBU? How did that happen?
Greg: That’s a great question, and actually, I have a wonderful answer for it.
I was a Sprout Social customer for about four years, running social media for a large technology organization out of the United Kingdom. I really loved the product. Once I got to talking with Sprout about a possible role at BAMBU, I thought to myself, “You know what? If Sprout treats their employees half as good as they treat their customers, this is going to be a great time for me.”
I’m here because I’m passionate about technology, because I believe in Sprout Social’s mission, and because I experienced Sprout Social from the inside looking out as a customer for about four years before joining the team.
I’ll tell you what. Everything that I suspected about the organization has been more than true. I’m surrounded by extremely smart people. They actually make me feel dumb, which I love, on a regular basis.
Jay: That’s fantastic. I love that story, and as a Sprout Social customer myself, I will echo the sentiments. I love the whole team over there, and they really treat everybody right.
Last question, Greg. Thanks for the great demo. Thanks for being here. Thanks for giving us such a cool product.
There’s obviously a ton of cool marketing tech out there. That’s why we have the Marketing Marvels show. What’s a marketing marvel to you? You got a couple of recommendations that people should look at?
Greg: Yeah. I have resisted the urge, for a long time now, to join the AR/VR bandwagon. Actually, at a conference that I was at recently, I was able to take a demonstration of the Oculus Rift. It’s a great product. I love it. There’s a lot of potential there, and it’s not just the Oculus. There are quite a few out there. We know about the others.
I thought to myself, “You know what? I’m going to grab a $12 version of Google Cardboard off of Amazon, and I’m going to go in to start experimenting.” I am stunned at the number of really quality VR apps I’ve been able to pull onto my iPhone.
I’m using my kids as a harbinger of things to come. “Hey, kids. Come here. Put this thing on, and tell me what you think about this.” We’ve been riding roller coasters and exploring reefs off of the coast of Australia.
I’ll tell you what, there is so much, I think, pent up possibility around VR right now that I can’t help but bring it up, and it almost feels old, at this point, for marketers. Like, “Yeah, VR. We’ve heard that before.”
Go out and get yourself a $12 version of Google Cardboard. It doesn’t matter what kind of phone you have. Pull a bunch of apps off the app store, and start experimenting, so you’re ahead of the curve.
Jay: Well, I think we’ve been talking about AR/VR for a while, but having a day-to-day, consistent use case hasn’t really been there. So I think you’re exactly right. We’re hitting that tipping point where it’s accessible to all or to most, and we’ll start to see lots and lots of different opportunities there. I agree.
I do the same to my kids. I’ve got two high-schoolers, and I play, “Is this lame or stupid?” with them all the time. It’s a really good way to trial balloon a lot of recommendations, not only for clients, but for Convince & Convert and for my personal brand. “Is this a good idea?” They tend to have a pretty good detector on what is worth time, because they’re pretty jaded just in general.
Greg: Yeah, agreed. Go out and get yourself Google Cardboard, and also go out and get yourself a couple of kids that you can test on.
Jay: That’s a good recommendation. On the next episode of Marketing Marvels, we will have an adoption agency join the show and talk about how you can get your own teenagers to do your R&D. That’s a good idea.
Greg, thanks so much for being here. Thanks again for all that you do at BAMBU. Remember, Marketing Marvels fans, go to getbambu.com/pricing and figure out how you can get access to this tool. You will end up with a social sharing revolution in your organization, and everybody wants that.
A reminder. Marketing Marvels does new shows about every three weeks. We bring you all kinds of fantastic, cool marketing technology like BAMBU. It’s a production of my firm, Convince & Convert Media, where we also do the Social Pros podcast, the Content Pros podcast, the Influence Pros podcast, the Business of Story podcast, which is all about using Hollywood storytelling principles in your marketing, and the daily Convince & Convert podcasts, where we take all of our very best blog posts and have professional voice talent read them so you can listen to podcasts into your head. If you want more information on that, go to convinceandconvert.com/podcasts.
For Marketing Marvels, make sure you get every episode. Go to bit.ly/marketingmarvels. That’s bit.ly/marketingmarvels. That will take you to the YouTube channel. You can subscribe there and never miss an episode.
Thanks very much on behalf of BAMBU. I’m Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, and this has been Marketing Marvels. Thanks for watching.