YouTube stars and other influencers are becoming increasingly important to brands, but they can be loose cannons.
With that in mind, Hashoff is launching a platform that makes it easy for brands to figure out which influencers are safe to work with.
New York-based Hashoff is creating a self-service platform to streamline the processing of whitelisting influencers, lining up brand collaborators, and managing content for social media campaigns.
The importance of having a “whitelist” of influencers has become abundantly clear in recent months. PewDiePie, the formerly hot YouTube star who has been caught up in a number of controversies, turned out to not be the safest influencer, particularly for brands that can’t risk nasty surprises.
So Hashoff wants to simplify the influencer whitelisting process for brands and enable real-time creator engagement and ongoing campaign measurement and management. The new service lets brands scale and measure return-on-investment for influencer campaigns, all from within a centralized dashboard.
With brand safety and transparency at its core, the service lets brands create private networks of whitelisted influencers and invite those influencers to join the networks. It provides transparent pricing information — by influencer, platform, and content type — streamlining the influencer contracting and negotiations process.
It also has collaboration tools that enable direct, real-time chat between brands and influencers over desktop and mobile devices. And its advanced search technology helps brands filter hundreds of thousands of influencers to ensure brand safety and pinpoint the best influencers for each campaign.
Hashoff has also created an integrated desktop and mobile platform that lets influencers upload content straight from their smartphones — and lets brands comment on, reject or approve content from anywhere.
And it has a streamlined payments process, in which brands set campaign budgets and influencers are paid directly by Hashoff once posts are published and verified — eliminating time-consuming invoicing processes.
The platform also delivers unified ROI measurement for organic and paid posts across multiple social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Brands can view and track engagement metrics in detailed graphs that show both the macro- and micro- components of each influencer’s post in order to more accurately measure overall campaign ROI.
“This launch is the next step in delivering on our promise to build great technology that makes it easier for marketers to build scalable and measurable influencer programs,” said Joel Wright, president and cofounder of Hashoff, in a statement. “We created the self-service platform to streamline the creative process between brands and micro-influencers, providing an end-to-end solution to identify, manage, create, collaborate, amplify, and accurately measure influencer campaigns. The platform brings automation to what is typically a highly manual, chaotic space. Through the platform, brands now have more direct control over the creative process with a clear, real-time picture of the impact and ROI of influencer posts.”
Hashoff was founded in 2014 and has 150,000 influencers in its platform.