Spark partners with New Zealand start-up Mish Guru

Thursday, 1 October 2015, 11:51 am
Press Release: Spark NZ

Spark partners with New Zealand start-up Mish Guru for Snapchat community management

Spark announced today that it is working with New Zealand digital start-up Mish Guru to manage its burgeoning Snapchat™ community. The partnership will mean Spark – the largest corporate user of Snapchat - will give rapid feedback to help develop and refine the platform.

Mish Guru was founded in 2014 by Jacob Duval, Ashok Fernandez, and Tom Harding, when they took part in Lightning Lab’s digital accelerator programme. The company provides analytics and content management tools for Snapchat™, allowing people and brands to manage communication to their followers and to share user-generated content. In June 2015 Mish Guru announced that it had received a further seed capital from leading New Zealand-based investors.

Spark Social Media Marketing Manager, Jessica Moloney, says she is excited about working with Mish Guru. She believes its product will transform a crucial part of Spark’s social media strategy.

“Over 100 million people use Snapchat every day and it’s one of the fastest growing social networking apps in the world. The people who use it are more engaged with the content than on almost any other platform. Increasingly, it’s where our customers are so it’s a no-brainer for us – we need to be there too,” said Moloney.

Spark launched its Snapchat account when it rebranded from Telecom and sent its Automatic Thanks Machine around New Zealand in August 2014. Since then the community has grown quickly, with around 14,000 New Zealanders actively engaging with Spark on Snapchat every day. The rapid growth means Spark has to manage those interactions effectively and efficiently, while also pulling useful for analytics and measurement to inform this management. Mish Guru’s product provides the perfect solution.

“Mish Guru provides better insights, which means we can generate better content and - most importantly - we can engage our customers more with content and conversations that are relevant to them.

“Being its largest and one of its first corporate customers is great too. Not only is there a wonderful piece of symmetry with Mish Guru receiving their initial funding from Lightning Lab for whom Spark is a national foundation partner, but its an extremely agile business – if we need a certain function, Mish Guru can roll it out quickly. The continuous and collaborative feedback loop between us is perfect – we get a product that does exactly what we need and Mish Guru gets a steady stream of feedback to help refine its product,” said Moloney.

Mish Guru’s Tom Harding says working with Spark is helping them crack into the United States Market.

“We’re thrilled to be working alongside Spark. Their team continues to surprise us with the new and creative use of our tools and the feedback they give means we’re able to continuously and confidently improve our product.

ENDS

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