How Social Catalyzers is driving organic content consumption using behavioural science and algorithms

Agencies responsible for engineering the social spread of a piece of brand communication are always on the go to find the right technique to make any message and content go viral. Some are highly and solely dependent on technology and data science, digging deep into consumer insights. Digital agency Social Catalyzers, on the other hand, depends on behavioural science and cross-pollinates it with algorithms to drive organic consumption of content and make it go viral.

In an interaction with BuzzInContent.com, Kalyan Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of Social Catalyzers, explained how to engineer the social spread of any content.  He discussed how the agency is cross-pollinating behavioural science in its execution to make any content go viral. Talking about its upcoming plans, he shared how technology has become a vital part of content marketing.

“Behavioural science is like Nudge Theory, where if we make any content appear that is already going viral, pushing it in community, we can create advocacy around it, making people believe that this content is lovable and influence them to watch it,” said Kumar.

The agency is getting into gamification-led influencer engagement for consumer engagement, using human behaviour around incentivising and buying pattern. Apart from this, Social Catalyzers studies algorithms for its strategies and plans to focus on performance-based influencer content marketing approach for reach and advocacy.

The agency has been gaining a lot of attention within clients on influencer marketing advocacy. Bigger brands are now choosing to work with SoCat, said Kumar.

“We tend to get anything between 20%-50% more than we commit and most other influencer marketing agencies in India not even able to commit that. There has to be accountability on influencer marketing getting it out to at least a minimum number of people,” he said. 

Being the only influencer marketing agency in India that launched an entire brand in India for the first time using only earned media approach for TooYumm, Kumar said almost no money was spent on Facebook, YouTube or Google directly for the brand. Everything was organic and the campaign reached around 48 million people in a month.

SoCat doesn’t do paid media, which is interruption-led targeting, but rather makes audiences choose content to derive organic consumption. It creates enough content recommendations and drives enough volume and virality to make content go viral, which includes millions of views, engagement and conversations.

Kumar said this is something unprecedented and brands have not seen that kind of earned media attraction that SoCat gets. “We want to focus at one specific tool, which is organic content dissemination.  We only have organic influencer marketing reach.”

Every other brand wants to engineer its social spread via content to an extent where it goes viral. They hire agencies for that virality and spread. When it comes to the credibility of the content, where does the responsibility lie? A brand on whose behalf an agency has distributed and disseminated the content or is it the brand, which has its own objectives to fulfil through that virality?

“The dissemination responsibility at the end of the day falls on the agency to achieve the objective of execution. The responsibility of all communications is collectively shared with the brand and the agency, because both literally are on the same side. Agencies always are aligned entirely whatever the plan is with the brand and the brand with the agency, so that there's no confusion about ownership,” Kumar said. Brands are the custodian of all communication, and so is the agency, which is an executor and thinker of the content.

Given that technology is said to have become a vital part of content marketing and influencer marketing, SoCat doesn’t look at a large amount of data currently. Asked why the agency is not tilted purely to technology, just like any other agencies, he said, “We have added behavioural science as a layer because that differentiates the technology from the art or the craft of content marketing and yet, at some point, both could be married. There is firing up of the digital escalation and I don’t think content marketing would be increased anything without technology after some years. There are many dimensions involved in the aspects of science into this.”

He called the booming of agencies in India as the demand and supply economic concept. “As long as somebody sees an opportunity as a need for an agency, there is always a room for innovation.  Also, the clients are looking for someone who can do something better. There would always be a need of a new agency,” he said.

Kumar, who is a fan of short and snackable content himself, doesn’t recommend long-format content to brands unless a brand has a very strong perspective that demands a longer format.

“Long-form content even for content creators is getting a hard job to get people to opt for it. Big platforms like Netflix, which used to make longer format, are coming up with a much shorter format, slowly getting into smaller episodes. In the long format, content is not going to win the battle from a brand’s perspective, because you have so much to communicate. And it's very hard to be very interesting.” 

After multiple efforts to make content go viral, brands fail to communicate their messages many times. Kumar said there could be so many reasons for a failure that you cannot blame an agency or brand since everyone's trying to get it right. Sometimes your communication is bad and you can have excellent dissemination.  Sometimes you have done great content, but some are just not disseminated properly. Sometimes, you can have great content and great information at the wrong time.

After having worked with multiple big brands, the agency will put a whole bunch of musicians and storytellers on YouTube. “We would be taking a whole bunch of Indie Pop musicians and Punjabi artists like Bohemia, Sharry Mann on board. It would be more of a brand integration and creating content for a brand integration point of view. We would be looking at a lot of movie marketing also,” Kumar said.