Sam Oakley is a public relations practitioner turned tech entrepreneur. He reckons that he’s identified a need for a new social media analytics tool. Six-years working on social media campaigns in an agency led him to the conclusion that existing tools do little to inform campaign insights, and instead are used to validate decisions that have already been made.

“Tools are only valuable if you act on the data yet most public relations practitioners and marketers rarely make substantive changes to their campaigns based on the information that tools generate,” said Oakley.

It’s an issue of complexity and the industry’s legacy of focusing on simple scores such as Klout rather than understanding behaviours says Oakley. He’s founded Stash Metrics to address the opportunity. The start-up has a mix of angel finance and seed funding from the business-to-brand accelerator Collider.

I got up with Oakley yesterday when he visited Ketchum in London.

Stash uses machine learning to generate a stash of data, hence the name, relevant to a brand from Instagram, and Twitter.

“There’s a balance between scale and context. Keyword listening tools such as Radian 6 and Sysomos are really good a scale whereas influencer management tools such as Little Bird and Traack are good at context around small groups but limited in terms of scale. We’re trying to combine the two,” said Oakley.

The tool queries networks searching for behaviours around a trigger such as a hashtag, link, or keyword, and identifies individuals that share similar behaviours. In this way it searches for unknown unknowns rather than reinforcing existing decisions.

Its early days: Oakley showed me a prototype yesterday. He’s looking for agencies and brands to help beta test and develop the tool. If that might be you connect with him on Twitter @samoakley.

Podcasting

Podcasting is a relatively new thing for me. I’ve started recording short interviews like this with people that I meet or who are part of my network.

You can access it on Soundcloud, via your favourite podcast app, or iTunes. Let me know what you think and thanks for listening.