Influitive Raises Another $7.3M To Bring The Peer-To-Peer Model To Marketing

Influitive, a marketing company that analyses data around social media, influencer networks and other peer-to-peer techniques to spread the word, has raised another $7.3 million — investment that it will use to continue developing its AdvocateHub marketing platform, as well as to build out its own sales and marketing teams, CEO and co-founder?Mark Organ told TechCrunch in an interview. The Series A round was led by new investors Hummer Winblad and Relay Ventures, with participation from existing backers?Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Illuminate Ventures, Resolute.VC and Common Angels, as well as several individual angels. The total now raised by Influitive is $11.05 million. As part of the deal, Influitive is picking up two new board members,?Lars Leckie?from Hummer Winblad and?Alex Baker?from Relay Ventures. The cynical ones among us might argue that most social networking today — being as it is open and free to use — is one big marketing vehicle. And the even more cynical ones might argue that there is less spontaneity of ideas and activity on social networks than you would think. At the same time, though, what’s clear is that people no longer rely on traditional advertising or salespeople to tell them about how great a product is, turning instead to social networks. “Customers rely on peer recommendations and reviews when they shop at home and rarely seek the counsel of a salesperson,” says Organ. “Those same behaviors are showing up in the workplace.” He notes estimates that buyers today can be two-thirds of the way through their decision-making process before they even contact sales. So what a company like Influitive does is?offer a kind of framework for brands to use all of the above to better effect. Organ notes that what Influitive is doing is not strictly new. “Every sales and marketing executive understands and accepts that customer validation is a critical part of the B2B buying process,” he notes. “Prospective customers need to understand just how a product performs in the real world, and today, that information is shared with them in the form of testimonials, case studies, reviews and reference calls. So, in this regard, the concept of advocate marketing is not new or disruptive.” What is new, he says, is how Influitive tackles customer validation. “Our approach encourages marketers to mobilize their customers first, and get them proactively sharing their product experiences in communities, forums and social networks where buyers are

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