Meet Sorc'd, The Digital Highlighter That Saves You Time

This article is more than 2 years old.

It was passion that often drove the conversations Bob Girolamo had with his lifelong friend, Jeff Cloud, who had also been in the advertising and marketing space for years and was equally curious about technology. At the time, they were both managing teams that built and sold digital marketing to clients who didn’t always know why they should use their products or how. Can you blame them? Bob and Jeff were in the space, and they still couldn’t keep up. Every day there was a new stat on social usage, or a new study on what apps are most useful to consumers, and so on. They spoke about how nice it would be to hold all of this information in one place so they could share with their teams and clients, build custom sales decks, or prove a point with third party research.

That’s when the idea for Sorc’d arose. Bob and Jeff believed that if they could have a digital highlighter that allowed people to save the most important pieces of their everyday reads, then they could save a lot of time not re-searching through articles and emails they had already read. Jeff kept his day job, but Bob’s wife, Emily and Bob were determined to make Sorc’d a successful solution with practical purposes that people could actually use on a daily basis.

They wanted to make it as simple as possible for users to save and organize the pieces of content they thought were interesting or most relevant, but also to actually use it in their content creation. So, the “highlighter” was built as a Chrome extension, with the cloud-based Sorc’d account in tandem. The online account allowed users to recall what they had highlighted using post type, category, and tag filters. But there was still a lot of copying and pasting going on when it came to integrating these “snippets” into a document, proposal, whitepaper, email, etc. Over the following year, they built an add-in for Microsoft Office that allowed users to add Sorc’d snippets directly from within Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and now Outlook (just launched Oct 2016). And, an add-on for Google Docs and Google Sheets that did the same.

This solution saves a lot of time for individuals, but teams, larger corporations, and client/agency relationships could benefit as well. As a result, they added private and enterprise memberships, favoriting snippets, sharing snippets directly to social media, and following others.

Sorc’d is far from finished with its product vision. There is still a lot they want to build to help others sort through and use important, relevant, and reliable information, and the team intends to integrate their solution wherever people are creating.

I had a chance to connect with Bob to learn more about how Sorc’d helps marketers, how they are approaching enterprise deals, and what is in store for the rest of the year.

Photo by 1871/Gregory Rothstein

Alexander Taub: The speed of information can be overwhelming. How does Sorc'd help marketers?

Bob Girolamo: With over 90% of the world’s data created in the past two years, it's no wonder marketers are overwhelmed. Sorc'd gives you the tools to pick only the pieces of information you find interesting or relevant. Whether it's online content, an internal document, or an email, our single platform allows you to highlight what's important, save it to a centralized location, and then easily recall it later and use it in your own content creation.

Taub: Why did you go the route of (highlighting) snipping information/content? Did you consider other ways?

Girolamo: When first starting to investigate the space, we found plenty of bookmarking options or tools to capture entire pages, but, realistically people didn't find time to go back and reread. Snipping just the pieces that are most important allows you to: 1. quickly grab what you want and move on, and 2. recall and integrate those small pieces into your content to streamline your workflow - no more copying and pasting from numerous open tabs.

Taub: Any great use cases you've heard from customers/users?

Girolamo: We have seen happy customers who are creating specialized content for their clients. Healthcare marketing is a good example of a field requiring significant technical research and demanding a high level of accuracy. Sorc'd provides the central repository for the team while brainstorming ideas, tracking down facts on the topic, providing guidance to the writers, and verification to the editors. Resulting in a much more efficient process.

Taub: What is the biggest hurdle for users?

Girolamo: Usually understanding how everything works together - the extensions, the add-ons, and the add-ins. Once you start using the tools, it's quite simple, you just have to do some work on the front end installing the extensions and add-ons or add-ins that are right for you - such as browser type and creation software. Our current users save over 30% of their time and boost productivity using our tools, you just have to get in, use them a few times, and then it becomes second nature.

Taub: Is Sorc’d meant for individuals? Big corporations? Someone else?

Girolamo: Sorc'd is an ecosystem where everyone benefits. We originally created Sorc'd for individuals to save digestible pieces of information and then use it later. But, we soon realized that if everyone on a team did this, we could cover more ground and discovery new insights - making it a more cohesive approach. And unlike most social channels that push out to people, Sorc'd users are able to pull information when they need it, and place it where they want it.

Taub: Where do you want to take Sorc’d in the next 5 years?

Girolamo: Our vision is to have Sorc'd everywhere you want to create. Integrating with marketing automation platforms like Hubspot and Marketo, content marketing workflow management platforms like Skyword and nDash, and social media management like Buffer and Hootsuite. We will be the glue that keeps your creation process together!

Taub: What do you have coming in 2017?

Girolamo: We'll continue to build out comprehensive suites - like the ones we have for Google Chrome, Google Docs, and Sheets, and Microsoft Office Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook. Our next product release will be a web clipper extension for Microsoft Edge.
