Dialogue Group

Dialogue Group is the parent of a number of brands (products and services) that help organisations and people have conversations. The Dialogue story started in 2010 by Hugh Stephens ( more about Hugh), when he identified that there was a need for reasoned, practical advice in the social media space. Thus, Dialogue Consulting was born, a company specialising in all things social media, particularly risk management, strategy and training. Since then (and even now), Dialogue Consulting has continued to grow over time, and enjoyed working with brands large and small, from health insurers through governments, and even startups. After 3 years working with awesome clients doing some really fun projects, the Dialogue Consulting team realised that there was a big piece missing in the social media space. Part of managing risk at some brands included 24x7 coverage of social media - but this wasn't always responding to customers 24x7 (particularly overnight or weekend). Existing solutions on the market were either building and operating a team inhouse (complex), using automated tools (quality wasn't great) or outsourcing community management out-of-hours to a provider (expensive). SocialSitter filled the gap in mid-2013, providing social media moderation services at a low cost using ethical outsourcing and a technology stack to make things easier and faster. SocialSitter is still in infancy, with a few core customers but without extensive marketing (...yet). In late 2013, the Dialogue team got frustrated when working with Instagram, Facebook's photo sharing app that has become rapidly popular with both individuals and brands. There had to be a better way for brands to manage their accounts - agencies were going crazy logging in and out of client Instagram accounts every day. But there wasn't (and isn't) an API for Instagram, which is why you couldn't use standard social media management tools to upload images or video to Instagram. So after a lot of failed experiments, we found a solution - which became Schedugram. Schedugram now takes up quite a bit of time for the team, experiencing rapid growth due to its first-mover advantage on the market. But then what about internally? Having worked on implementations of Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs), the Dialogue team noticed in 2014 that one of the challenges facing modern human resources departments (and organisations more broadly) was tracking how engaged and happy employees were over time. While not a new concept, existing practice involved long (50+ question) surveys, usually conducted every 2 years, with the expertise of expensive external consultants (or of course not at all!). This was the idea behind Barometrics - an easy way for companies to track internal engagement and satisfaction that didn't waste employee time, and providing granular time-series results that would allow action to be taken quickly once issues were identified, not 2 years later. The final elements are coming together for a Barometrics launch in 2016. Dialogue Group has a few more ideas brewing, and will continue to add products and services (or services-as-a-product even) to our stable. Our focus is to facilitate conversations, whether internally or externally, big brands or small.