• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 17, 2014

Social discovery and “scoring” engine Soci just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding led by angel investor Peter Fisher, along with help from Silicon Valley Growth Syndicate.

The start-up plans to use the capital to expand its social content discovery, scoring and management SaaS offering.

Soci specializes in discovering and scoring social content based on its ability to engage audiences. It helps clients re-source content to create programmatic social media content cycles, in the words of CEO Afif Khoury.

“By scoring the social Web, we’ve made it possible for anyone to serve as an extremely savvy social media manager,” Khoury stated.

Along with Fisher, investors include Asaf Benhaim, founder of iMatrix, and Trevor Klein and David Klein, co-founders of AutoAnything.com.

Despite the popularity of services like Klout, marketers have recently cooled to the general practice of “social scoring." Asked whether they found such services useful for finding “influencers,” a majority of marketers (55%) said “no,” according to a survey of about 1,300 marketers released last year by Sensei Marketing and the consultants at ArCompany. 

“The majority of marketers surveyed … stated they either distrust the metrics reported by social-scoring platforms or that they’ve had little success using them,” Sam Fiorella, partner at Sensei Inc., a Toronto-based consulting firm, said at the time.

Yet, that didn’t stop Lithium Technologies from buying Klout for a reported $100 million, in March. The deal came after Klout shifted strategic direction, last year, by teaming up with Mass Relevance to help broadcast networks and publishers get more out of Twitter.