Addvocate launches a new employee-powered social marketing platform, hires new CEO

Months after the departure of former CEO Marcus Nelson, Addvocate is still on track and releasing a new version of its social media platform today.

Addvocate’s platform doesn’t spend a ton of time trying to drum up excitement about a company by getting customers or fans happy. Instead, it focuses on empowering current employees to share things via personal social networks throughout the day. It’s a much better solution than hoping employees will do it on their own, and one that doesn’t require them to turn over user names and passwords (a practice that’s been ruled illegal in some states, anyhow).

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The startup’s new “Addvocate 2” platform does this by routing all company-related social media sharing through a central hub that can be reviewed by a small group of people. For example, sharing a marketing-related how-to article on Facebook can get routed through the new platform rather than just having it push out to just that employee’s friends without getting acknowledged otherwise.

“We’re trying to move companies into a role where they can actually use employees as their biggest fans to spread the word on social networks,” said new CEO Piers Cooper in an interview with VentureBeat. “You can think of it more of a moderation role.”

Cooper, who previously worked as VP of business development at Oracle, was promoted to CEO after a stint as the company’s chief operations officer. He’s replacing former CEO and founder Marcus Nelson, who previously worked as head of social media at Salesforce, after what some say was a forced departure.

Yet Cooper tells me the company is in good shape. Addvocate, he said, now has 20 paying customers, with the largest paying for 1,000 employees on the platform. (The company makes $10 per employee, per month from its clients on average.) Growth is also up, he added, with revenue increasing by 50 percent month-over-month.

Founded in 2012, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $2.54 million in funding to date.