All of the following choices fall under Customer Advocacy platforms, but align with different company & program goals. 

I suggest an Advocacy platform when you are hoping to build and scale an advocacy program across several types of customers and activities. This may include references and most advocacy platforms can manage references, reviews, sending surveys, and collecting basic customer stories.

These platforms tend to innovate in the advocacy space adding features such as identifying potential advocates through customer data,  job tracking, numerous categorization options (and an interface that makes it easy to use), and integrating with several platforms.

Since these are Advocacy first platforms, the product is built with the goal of helping you find, choose, and activate advocates. 

Reference management platforms are created with the express purpose of identifying program members for a reference, managing approvals, sending messages, and booking times for reference calls with prospects. 

A big difference I see between Advocacy & Reference platforms is their primary purpose. For instance, one advocacy platform manages references as well but doesn't have features for you to manage the branding when it comes to messaging. A References first platform will manage this well and includes content management in their software. 

You'll find small differences between these softwares that impact your processes, time to complete tasks, and ease of use (for example reference platforms need to cater to UX issues for most of the sales, success and marketing teams, where advocacy software needs to work well for you).

When every team needs customer content to help with ideas, marketing, closing deals, and supporting partners, a Customer Evidence platform is a good choice. 

What really stands out for a Customer Evidence platform is the focus on driving massive amounts of content quickly, while making that content findable by anyone in your company, and then adding design aspects automatically to save you time. 

One of my favorite aspects is the idea that you can ask your customers questions over and over, like surveys and yet still see all of their answers based on the customer/user. 

Since Influitive was acquired many platforms in our space have innovated in order to add more features and better align themselves with an advocacy and community approach to customer marketing. Today most of the advocacy platforms have some integration to offer with community platforms. 

Coming soon!

Coming soon!