Grabbr employs blockchain tech to lock-record its social sharing

Social referral marketing platform Grabbr has launched a blockchain-based ledger to transparently track key events.

Based in Franklin, Tennessee, the company offers rewards to users who share marketing content via email, social networks or SMS. Its platform was launched in January.

In a typical use case, CTO Eric Ramos told me, a marketer sets up a campaign in the Grabbr dashboard so that users “share this to get that.” The marketer identifies the material to be shared, as well as the reward, which might be a free digital copy of a book, a discount coupon or a downloadable song.

The campaign might ask the user to share the material in her social feed on one of the supported social platforms (Twitter, Linkedin or Google+), to email it to at least two people or to relay it via SMS. The platform can also generate a QR code that leads to a campaign landing page, or it can provide embed code for a trackable link that can be embedded anywhere, leading to the campaign landing page.

If the user chooses to email, the addresses of the recipients need to be entered by the user into a Grabbr field on a marketer’s property, and the platform sends the emails. The addresses, Ramos said, are not used for other purposes without user opt-in.

The emails, SMS, and links are thus tracked by the platform, and an SDK for the three social platforms tracks whether the post showed up in the feed. Once the share has been completed, the user receives the reward directly or via a link. Here’s a typical sequence:

Ramos said a typical campaign might have up to a thousand users. Marketers pay per share, although the record of how widely the material was shared is all in Grabbr’s platform.

Now, the company has created the Grabbr Campaign Block Chain, or GCBC, which acts as an encrypted and distributed ledger to track the key events in the sharing, including time stamps, the platform (e.g., Twitter, email) that generated the share and other related data. In this way, Ramos said, a marketer gets immediate, relatively independent and permanent confirmation of the campaign’s particulars.

The private blockchain is a custom implementation that uses the open-source, enterprise-focused Open Chain platform, and it is being employed by some of Grabbr’s current brand customers during this pilot.

Grabbr’s blockchain can handle the transactions in real time, compared to the slow processing of some other blockchain protocols. Validation of a block is conducted via automation instead of human miners and their mining processing systems, so that each transaction is immediately locked into a block.

While blockchain-based technology is sprouting up all over, particularly for this kind of locked and distributed ledger recording, Ramos said Grabbr’s implementation is notable because of how closely it is integrated into the company’s platform.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.