Carbon Black Boosts its Marketing and PR Initiatives with GaggleAMP

Ryan Murphy of Carbon Black wanted a way to expand his company’s social media reach. He knew that employees were the key but didn’t have an effective way to easily activate them.

This issue came to a head when he found himself struggling to get employees to promote accolades the organization received. Carbon Black, a cybersecurity company in Waltham, MA, garnered the designation of “Leader” by an industry analyst firm.

The marketing team drafted an email from the CEO that asked employees to promote the recognition on social media and even included suggested posts for them to use. But out of the hundreds of employees who received the email, only a few dozen actually shared the news to their followers.

“This just really wasn’t satisfactory to us,” Murphy said. “And as we were growing the company, we realized this process in general just wouldn’t scale.”

Murphy, the senior public relations manager, has been a one-man band for the company’s social media strategy, public relations initiatives and more. He needed a way to move the needle on social media and employee engagement in the most effective way possible without it taking up a majority of his time.

That’s when GaggleAMP came into the picture.

The Rollout

Carbon Black hired a VP of Marketing Operations, who described to his new team how GaggleAMP improved the number of followers and social influence at a prior organization.

"He talked about [GaggleAMP's] ability to solve this very problem. So he told us to take a look at it."

Ryan Murphy

Senior Public Relations Manager at Carbon Black

Murphy took his colleague’s advice and enrolled the company in a two week trial of GaggleAMP, where about two dozen employees improved Carbon Black’s engagement and reach across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The cybersecurity company of over 1,200 employees, moved forward with GaggleAMP and introduced it to the company at its annual sales kickoff meeting. The marketing team showed their coworkers how easy GaggleAMP is to use, how simple it is to log in through the Okta integration, and how it improves reach and engagement without much effort.

Just two weeks later, they had employees promoting content on their personal social media accounts.

"Our strategy was quick, but I think it was effective. From there, we just started taking people on and the numbers grew quickly."

Ryan Murphy

Senior Public Relations Manager at Carbon Black

In just its first calendar year with GaggleAMP, Carbon Black doubled its engagement numbers across all social media platforms from 30,000 to 60,000 and continues to see an aggressive rise in followers and engagement on social media.

"GaggleAMP has been absolutely critical to the social media program for Carbon Black. Before we started using GaggleAMP, social media was very much a manual effort that often required gratuitous effort. With GaggleAMP, we found a tool that makes engagement and increasing total followers a bit easier."

Ryan Murphy

Senior Public Relations Manager at Carbon Black

Public Relations Boost

Increasing the social media reach and engagement rate of your brand is very important, but for a PR professional, the biggest benefit of GaggleAMP is its ability to facilitate engagement with reporters and get on their radar. This way journalists are more likely to give your brand great coverage and use your experts as sources in stories.

Carbon Black has an existing relationship with CNN, and often has security experts and C-level executives invited onto the news network to talk on air about any breach or cybersecurity topics that make headlines.

The company started leveraging its Gaggle®️ Members to enhance this relationship. After a CNN reporter tweets out a clip of the segment, Murphy adds it to the Gaggle to boost its engagement. Of course, the reaction is always positive.

A CNN on-air reporter told Carbon Black’s executives that his social media engagement and following gets a huge boost every time they conduct an interview, and this doesn’t happen with any other source.

"This is GaggleAMP specifically driving additional PR attention. I couldn't envision a better scenario for one person looking to move the needle. It's a very easy and effective way to do that. Our ability to get our company — not just our corporate handle — but our company to engage with reporters and media sources has in some ways made us a go-to source for some of the prime networks out there."

Ryan Murphy

Senior Public Relations Manager at Carbon Black

Today, Carbon Black has 500 employees active on GaggleAMP and aims to grow its employee advocacy program even further. It holds an orientation for new employees every six weeks where it includes a 15-minute training session to familiarize new hires with GaggleAMP, explain its value to the company, and ask them to sign up.

Through the employee advocacy program, Carbon Black’s marketing team has seen profound growth in demand generation through the promotion of its webinars, events, white papers, data sheets and more, across social media.