Social Startup: Percolate

“What should I say?” It’s the question and number one challenge brands ask themselves every day, according to Noah Brier, co-founder of Percolate, a social SaaS startup dedicated to answering that call. “Percolate is interested in helping brands create content at social scale,” Brier explained.

Percolate started in 2011, a few years after Brier met his co-founder James Gross at likemind event, what The New York Times called “a monthly kaffeeklatsch for creative professionals” (and something Brier co-founded as well). Brier was at The Barbarian Group and Gross was at Federated Media, and both realized that there was a need not being met: helping brands figure out what to do with all of the fans and followers they were collecting.

Brier knew that the potential was there, but first helping brands move away from “the blank boxes” of Facebook and Twitter needed to happen. “People are looking for the silver bullet ad unit, and we’ve got it already: it’s a Tweet, a Facebook post, a photo,” said Brier. The challenge as he sees it, then, is to simply and repeatedly create shareable content for those ad units. “Brands’ problem is not that they’re rich with content. The challenge they have is how to create enough every day to continue to be relevant.”

Which is why Percolate is designed for their main users: community managers. CMs can quickly and efficiently create content using their system in preformatted blocks designed for the standard social networks. Users get content briefs to suggest future content based on what they’ve already created through Percolate, making discovery that much easier.

Brier feels strongly about making CMs lives’ better, and says he wants to serve them as much as CMOs. “One of the things that need to change is that community managers need to get more of a seat at the table than they have right now. They’re frequently at the end of the cycle, but they’re asked to oversee the most strategic brand assets they have. They need to have a bigger role, not just posting content.”

To that end, Percolate has hosted a monthly event called Speakeasy for CMs to get together, socialize, hear speakers, and more. For now they only happen in New York, but they have plans to take a road show soon.

Ultimately, Brier believes that “Great social content lives at the intersection of brand voice and cultural relevance. That’s always been true but what’s changed is that cultural relevance happens so much faster now. As a brand your challenge is to make that connection in real time. We’re trying to build tools to surface that relevance and make it easy to create the content.”

Percolate most recently raised a $9M Series A in November of 2012, led by GGV, First Round Capital and Lerer Ventures. Their current customers include Fortune 500 companies such as GE, Xerox, and American Express.