Firstup

Firstup is a well-suited solution for companies that would like to spread brand awareness and get employees to be their number one ambassadors. Employees like to share/brag about the company they work for so why not use them as a driving force in spreading brand awareness!

I stand behind Firstup and the form of communication they are working hard to integrate in the workplace experience across the world. Where I pause is the support structure. I've been lucky with the Customer Success Managers I've been assigned and I'm so grateful for their support and partnership. But when issues need to go above my CSM, I don't feel as supported. I feel more time is spent on telling us how we're incorrect (i.e. remedial explanations, unrealistic expectations to troubleshoot, etc.) than listening to resolve issues together.

The platform is well suited for content curation, social sharing, and internal communications.
The platform needs improvements and more features for the email service features for communication.

If you have fragmented communications, if you're not using an Intranet, Firstup will be life-changing.

Firstup is a nice platform for the price; however, if your team wishes to have access to customer success and support, you will not find it with them.

I think it's a great product that ultimately has a lot of room for improvement. If you're looking for a platform that's easy to set up and get team members trained on in terms of managing content and the back-end, I don't think Firstup is the appropriate solution. If you have time to invest and full-time team members who can dedicate themselves to being experts on managing the back-end, then this app is a better solution for you. If targeting communications, sharing videos, photos, and files to deskless workers is important, this is a good solution. Be very thorough in understanding the technology available to your team members (i.e. how many have smartphones, etc.). Also, you need to keep in mind that this will only work on iPhones in China. In our experience, most Chinese team members do not have iPhones.

Firstup is great for sharing information with our front line associates. We currently have no channel beyond in-person meetings to communicate company initiatives to our crew. While Firstup isn't a replacement for that, it's a supplement. It serves as a way to reach people who may have missed the meeting. It also serves as a reminder and/or a way to reengage with topics we've already discussed. It's also a great way for our CEOs to get video messages out directly to associates. (This is something we can do for managers via email, but we cannot currently do for associates.) It's less suited for training. For the company, participation is optional, so this will always be a supplement and never the primary source of information.

Firstup would be best suited as part of an overall communications tool where social sharing is part of its goal but not the main one. Firstup would benefit from working on its social interactions to make them more prevalent for those looking to use it as a social amplification tool first.

We were launching new products and this was a great way to post articles and get the word out on our new products and or services. I have many connections on my LinkedIn and being able to share the most up to date industry news and events, is a very helpful tool. Maybe there is a way to connect it to events within our organization to share pictures that the group could share to LinkedIn, etc.

It is less appropriate for sharing opinion pieces and/or articles only concentrating on one aspect of a situation instead of multiple. It's great that we can share articles that are not just "organization specific" and more industry-wide.

Firstup is good for when most of your users are on mobile. It is also a requirement that the links be accessible from outside your network. This was a challenge for us. We found the desktop app to be redundant to the web site. The only benefit was the alerts you would receive while it was open. If your employees are not comfortable with online communication, be prepared for extra work. I could also see it being less useful in a small company where you have fewer "stories" to tell.

It works great for our hourly, geographically distributed workforce. It's not only a resource to look up benefits, but also a resource for learning about benefit options associates may not know exist. By making it the opening browser page, it's an easily accessible resource for our computer-bound associates as well. It's a one-stop-shop for associates, and as the functionality grows it will become even more useful.

Firstup is a great tool for newer companies that don't already have a suite of platforms that they already use, as it offers a great one-stop-shop for internal communications and employee advocacy. Their apparent focus is on the platform as an internal communications tool and resource tool for companies.

Works adequately as a social selling platform, in that the basic functionality is there. Recent improvements have really positioned it as a full-featured internal comms platform.

It is well suited when trying to amplify your brand voice and get your brand recognized beyond just your brand social media pages. Firstup also allows the marketing team (or whoever owns the account) to use the brand language and ensure the posts are on-brand because we write the posts, and then our users just share the posts to their personal accounts.

I believe it is phenomenal for one-way communication and article sharing. We only use it for advocacy, but I can see how the capabilities of the platform would make for a great employee communication system. Messaging can be targeted and sorted to specific audiences and you can even get stats on how the messaging was received/read. I love DS for its content curation system. You can set up RSS feeds to be reviewed for easy publishing, accept submissions from users, or manually add your own content. It allows you to maintain a personal touch on something that is seemingly automated.

Firstup was very good at making it easy for our employees to share the news of our company, however getting engagement from all groups found to be difficult. We did many trainings, competitions, but could not get engagement on all levels. People either really saw the value of the product or never signed in.