Inside the engine room

Most people see the front of SocialKred, the campaigns, the posts, the dashboards. Far fewer see what is running underneath. We sat down with our CTO, Jerome Charvet, to talk attribution, security, data rights, and where AI is taking the platform next.

Q: For anyone who is not living inside the platform every day, what does SocialKred actually do?

Jerome: At its simplest, SocialKred turns a company’s sales teams into a distribution network. Instead of content only going out from a single corporate channel, it goes out through your sellers, your partners, and your ambassadors, and onto their own social channels where their buyers and prospects actually are.

The challenge we have been solving most recently, and it is the prize really, is attribution. How do we attribute and quantify the pipeline each seller has actually generated through their own social activity? That is the part nobody else has cracked properly, and it is what turns social selling from a nice-to-have into something a sales leader can measure and forecast against.

Q: Let’s stay on attribution, because that is the bit people tell me is genuinely unique. Walk me through how it works.

Jerome: It starts with a content campaign. The organisation creates a content campaign, which includes a link to a landing page, and sends it out to their sales teams. A seller opens it on their mobile, via the SocialKred mobile app, and when they accept the campaign, we generate a short URL. That URL is unique to the combination of that campaign and that individual seller. It is a one-to-one fingerprint.

The seller then posts that short URL on their own social media (LinkedIn, X, Instagram etc.) via the mobile app. When one of their connections or followers clicks it, we capture that information. When the prospect then lands on the organisation’s landing page, we have a pixel waiting there. So we pick the prospect back up on the website, and we can already tie them to the seller who originally posted.

From that point onwards, we can see what the prospect does on the landing page. How long they spend on site, whether they call, whether they fill in a form, whether they watch a video. All of that flows into our backend. And if that prospect eventually converts, becomes a client or makes a purchase, we can attribute that closed deal all the way back to the seller whose social activity sourced it.

Q: How is that different from what someone already gets from Google Analytics or a tool like Hootsuite?

Jerome: They each give you a piece, but only a piece. Google will tell you how many people came to your website, and that is it. A tool like Hootsuite will tell you which member of your team posted to LinkedIn, say, and that is it.

What neither of them does is close the loop between the individual seller who posted and the actual pipeline and revenue on the website. That end-to-end attribution is the part we believe nothing on the market can compare with right now.

For a sales team, it answers the question every leader wants answered: which rep’s social activity is genuinely building pipeline, and which deals it sourced.

Q: Security comes up in almost every conversation we have, especially with insurers or financial services companies. How is SocialKred built to be secure?

Jerome: The most important thing to understand is that SocialKred is not a single monolithic system. It is not one block. We run several independent services, and each service has its own security requirements.

The public-facing parts most people see are the web application and the mobile application. All communication between those two is encrypted, and neither of them retains the information itself. The data is written into separate servers sitting behind the different services. One service handles gathering information from social media, for example verifying that a seller actually posted, then sending back the reactions, comments, and audience for that post. Another service exists purely to analyse that information and turn it into insights and feedback for the organisation.

Because the services are separated and each is secured to its own requirements, a problem in one area is isolated rather than affecting the whole platform.

Q: And if something does go wrong, how resilient is it?

Jerome: We have built in redundancy. Data is backed up and duplicated. If a server gets overloaded, we do not drop anything. We start queuing the packets and hold them until the issue is resolved.

We have also built our own internal monitoring. If a service starts failing, it flags and alerts us automatically. Right now that alert lands in Slack so the team sees it immediately, and we are extending that to other channels like email and WhatsApp. The point is that if something fails, we know straight away and manage it, before it ever gets near to becoming a problem for our customers.

Q: What about encryption protocols and security certifications, where do we stand?

Jerome: All of our information is encrypted. On formal certifications, ISO and SOC 2 are active priorities. In fact, I had a call with a penetration tester just this morning. So this is live work, not something on a wish list. It is the next box we are going to tick.

Q: How does the platform handle GDPR?

Jerome: As I said, everything is encrypted. Beyond that, if an organisation or an individual exercises their rights, to have their data delivered to them, or simply deleted, they make the request to us and we action it. Their information is either handed over or removed from our servers.

Q: A couple of data-rights questions that procurement teams always ask. When a contract ends, do we keep any residual copy of a client’s data?

Jerome: No residual at all. When data is removed, it is removed. Nothing can be traced back to whatever that information previously contained.

Q: And if a client wanted to leave and take their data with them, can we export it and return it?

Jerome: Yes, easily. It has not actually happened to-date, but if a client requests their data, we can hand it back to them without any difficulty.

Q: What does support look like for a client once they are on the platform?

Jerome: We have an internal support system built in. When a client is logged into the platform they can raise a ticket, which notifies the person responsible, and that routes through to our support inbox. The whole team can see those tickets in our back-admin, reply to them, and mark them as solved once the client’s question has been resolved.

Q: Looking ahead, what is in the pipeline that you are excited about?

Jerome: Attribution is the foundation, and it is something I have personally advocated for over a long time. But as we mature, and as our thinking moves on from what we used to call employee advocacy towards what we now think of as social selling, the next step is getting better and better at the data. The more efficiently we gather the right data and organise it, the better the insights we can hand back to sales teams. Think richer campaign analytics that do not just report what happened, but help a sales team build more pipeline on their next content campaign.

There is also AI, and there is an important distinction I want to make here. We are not chasing AI for its own sake. We have used machine learning in the backend for a while, and now we are putting AI to work where it genuinely helps. For instance, the backend can attempt to auto-fix certain issues on its own, and I have been building natural-language querying into the back-admin so you can interrogate the data conversationally.

One idea I have been pushing for a couple of years is a pre-campaign scoring system. Before a seller posts, AI looks at the content, the image, the messaging, and gives it a score against the audience they are trying to reach, so they have a sense of how the post is likely to perform, and how much pipeline it is likely to drive, before it goes out.

And crucially, AI should not only benefit our clients. It should make us faster too. There is a lot we can build to work smarter day-to-day, identify opportunities quicker, and stay ahead.

Everyone has access to AI now, so dev teams everywhere are turning things around faster. The way you stay ahead is by keeping the ideas coming, and deciding on which ones are worth pursuing for the benefit of your customers.

Q: It feels like that is the real positioning, not an off-the-shelf tool, but a genuine technology partner.

Jerome: Exactly. What makes SocialKred attractive is not only the platform we have already built. It is the relationship. We can push content to specific seller pages, not just one corporate page, and we can offer partners things that sit outside the standard product because we work with them as a true technology partner. We have always been that way. What is great now, is that the right partners are letting us be exactly that.