Here’s how social platform Earshot is scoring you

The trend of assigning a single score to a digital marketing value continues.

Today, Chicago-based social engagement platform Earshot is joining the movement with its own social relevancy score.

Called the Decibel Level, it is a measurement of whether a person is a good prospect for a sale or other conversion in a given brand campaign.

“We tried to create a unique score [so we could understand] who that person is,” CEO and founder David Rush told VentureBeat.

The Decibel Level of a tweet someone sends, for example, might be 8.5 (on a scale ranging from a low of 0.1 to a high of 9.9) for a Honda campaign, but only as a 3.5 for Toys ‘R Us. Although it is tagged to a post or tweet, the score is actually a lead scoring of that person for the campaign. A brand can determine the cutoff level for its message targeting, such as everyone who scores 7.5 or above.

A person’s score depends on the goals of the campaign as well as such metrics as the post itself, location, sentiment, weather, bio, time of day, followers, and other factors. The score also takes into account, for instance, if the person is in a locale that is experiencing hot weather — in which case she might be interested in some messaging about Gatorade or a similar hot-weather brand.

Above: An Earshot screen, showing its new Decibel Level scores (7.5, 7.2, 7.3)

Image Credit: Earshot

Other recent attempts at distilling a variety of measurements into a single marketing score have included Uberflip, Conductor, and BrightEdge.

Of course, social media marketing platforms are continually evaluating people these days. Rush points to established social marketing platforms like Hootsuite, Sprinklr, and Lithium but adds that “our interests are to complement these existing platforms” by scoring leads in ways that are less reliant on numbers of followers, influencers, or brand mentions in a post.

A 2013 Brandwatch Report cited by Earshot found that only 3.6 percent of all tweets actually mentioned a brand.

Rush also distinguishes Earshot from a social monitoring/listening platform like Radian6 because his company’s platform can “give insight at the location level.”

“We’re not looking for the macro trends,” he told us, but instead Earshot wants to know “how the parking is at Nordstrom’s” or whether a person is camping in Yosemite National Park. That information could pump up the Decibel Level score so the platform can send an appropriate campaign message — from a competing high-end clothing store with an uncrowded parking lot or from an outdoor brand like North Face — at the right time.