Hailing from a music industry background, Lane Gregory knows the power of a crowd. As the founder and CEO of Crowdshare — a social media management company — Gregory is no stranger to leveraging the support of friends, family, coworkers, employees, and customers to build strong brands and heighten engagement.

Gregory brings over 20 years of experience in advocacy marketing to Crowdshare, having worked in the past with big names in the automotive, tech, hospitality, and government industries. His passion for helping businesses of all sizes grow their reach and make an impact is evident. The Crowdshare platform allows small businesses to compete with their larger peers. 

A Social Media Maverick

Gregory honed his brand marketing skills while working in the music industry during the latter half of the 1990s. As the internet was just taking off and bands were beginning to realize the power of online exposure, Gregory began developing engaging websites for bands and electronic press kits for clubs. In a precursor to social media-based fan engagement, Gregory took to Yahoo! Chat to promote the up-and-coming bands he worked with. 

“The best thing about Yahoo! Chat was you could find anything,” Gregory remembers. “We started finding groups like the ‘Manhattan Two-Steppers’ in Manhattan, Kansas, and started building digital street teams for the musicians we partnered with.” 

This approach was wildly successful, allowing the country groups that Gregory supported to work their way North from Texas. “I had a lot of bands come to me, because according to them, I had found ‘The Way’.”

Through this work, Gregory realized he had a specific knack for knowing what sold — and what could tank a band’s image. After selling his company at the age of 25, artists and repertoire (A&R) reps began approaching him as an independent consultant to build packages that could be sold to record labels. Gregory would then spruce up their image, whether that be through a cleaned up logo or a tightened brand message. All of this work was done as social media was just beginning to blow up within the Zeitgeist, with MySpace securing its popular platform and Facebook beginning to take shape. Nevertheless, Gregory was well prepared to take on the changing branding landscape.

Crowdshare 

Crowdshare was born on a duck boat, of all places, when Gregory was duck hunting one day with a friend in East Texas. The friend expressed interest in beginning his own hunting guide business and asked for Gregory’s help with branding and getting a foothold in social media marketing. 

“He asked, ‘Should I buy ads,’ and I immediately said ‘No!’. He was a niche of a niche of a niche market,” said Gregory. Instead, he advised his friend to focus on growing word of mouth marketing. Like a game of telephone, his friends would tell their friends about the hunting guide business, and attention would grow organically. With this idea, the spark that would eventually become Crowdshare was lit. 

“I genuinely looked at him and heard the words of Steve Jobs. I thought, ‘there’s an app for that, I’m sure.’ It turned out that there wasn’t,” says Gregory.

But there is now. The idea of Crowdshare leverages the power of one’s personal “crowd” — family, friends, employees, clients, and rabid fans — to extends the organic reach of a brand. The crowd gets a code unique to your profile, and when a post is created, the crowd receives a push notification. Posts can then be instantly reshared across Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. 

Almost nothing can elevate a brand into the stratosphere quite like viral content. Crowdshare nudges engaging content towards viral status and quickly helps brands gain authority and popularity, both online and in the real world.

Crowdshare is the perfect platform for small businesses that want to gain the traction and attention typically reserved for larger organizations with big marketing budgets. Featuring the capability of gaining 1,000+ shares of one’s content, analytics to track success, photo and video editing capabilities, and room for managing over 36 brands at once, Crowdshare puts all of the social media marketing needs of a small business in one place. 

“We are the only company on the planet that has mastered word-of-mouth marketing,” says Gregory.

Gregory has taken his branding expertise and created a way for businesses of any size to greatly expand their content reach, post clicks, shares, and overall engagement. Through analytics, businesses can see what content works, what doesn’t, and how they may need to pivot their messaging to reach more people. 

In addition to growing Crowdshare, Gregory is currently writing a book called “Beat to Sh*t” that aims to be the “Survivalist Guide to Running a Business.” He also continues to work as a consultant for businesses looking to expand their reach. 

Through Crowdshare, Gregory is letting businesses big and small in on the secret of social media success that he discovered long ago: It’s all who you know and who you tell.