.png)
Most platforms give you stats. Opens, likes, active users. Useful, but they only tell you what happened.
The next level is insight: what the pattern means, and what to do about it. That's the gap Blink iQ was built to close, and before opening it to customers, we did the obvious thing. We ran it on ourselves.
Blink is 150 people, sitting at desks, building software for the 80% of the workforce who don't. We've used our own platform every working day for twelve years, since the company was founded in November 2014. That gave us something unusual: twelve years of accumulated context, and twelve months of activity to analyze against it.
What came back sorted itself into six kinds of intelligence. Each one follows the same shape: something we could suddenly see, and something we could do about it.
Influence intelligence: every company has a Ricky
Ricky Sickelmore's posts reach 84% of their audience. He's #1 in likes and #1 in unique viewers, with 388 colleagues seeing his content in a month.
The interesting part isn't the ranking. It's that the data exposes the pattern behind it: 97% of his posts are visual, his content splits evenly across Social, News, Recognition, and Customer Success, and he shows up seven days a week. Influence isn't charisma. It's a repeatable formula - visual, balanced, consistent - and once you can see the formula, you can teach it.
What you can see: who your real influencers are, and what they do differently.
What you can do: amplify the people already cutting through, instead of guessing who your champions should be.
Reach intelligence: one platform, two worlds
211,042 app opens in the last 30 days. 141,610 from desks. 69,432 from pockets. Head office and in the field, reading the same thing at the same moment.
The split matters more than the total. Reach isn't about sending more, it's about knowing which channels carry your message to which people. And the cleanest case study in our data is the person at the top of the company.
Our CEO reads on his phone and writes from his desk
Sean Nolan opens the Blink iPhone app more than any other employee in the company, by a meaningful margin. But 58% of his messages are composed on a computer.
The pattern makes sense once you see it. Sean is often on a plane between Boston and London, in a customer's distribution center, or hosting a partner in one of our offices. He reads while he's moving. He writes when he's sitting. No calendar tool would ever surface that, but the platform records it cleanly, and it's one of the strongest signals in our data that the company's most senior person is doing the thing we ask everyone else to do: stay close to customers.
At workforce scale, a leader's reading and writing habits stop being trivial. They become one data point in a comparative picture of how leadership behaves across an organization, and whether the frontline is actually being heard or just being broadcast at.
What you can see: exactly who your communications reach, on which surface, who they never touch, and how visible your leaders really are to the frontline.
What you can do: close the gaps by channel and location before they become blind spots. At customer scale, a language gap between two regions can already be a six-week hole in safety comms before anyone notices.
Adoption intelligence: nobody adopts four features of a "comms tool"
97% of our users actively chat. 94% use the Hub for resources. 89% engage with the Feed. 59% use Stories.
Adoption breadth is the difference between a channel and a workplace. People tolerate a comms channel. They live in a workplace. When messaging, knowledge, news, and culture all run through one platform, the data stops being comms data and starts being a picture of how the organization operates.
What you can see: which features each team actually lives in.
What you can do: invest where behavior already is, not where the roadmap says it should be.
Workflow intelligence: the busiest conversation wasn't where we guessed
Customer Success and Implementation exchanged 42,223 chat messages in twelve months. More than any other pair of functions in the company. More than most teams send within their own walls.
You could assume the handoff from launch to management was a one off event, a baton pass. The data says it's a permanent conversation, and it's the structural backbone of how a customer is set up for success. This is the finding that goes furthest beyond comms: it's operations data. The org chart shows reporting lines. The message graph shows where work actually flows.
What you can see: the hot bridges between teams, the missing ones, and the one person quietly holding a handoff together who nobody realizes is the bottleneck.
What you can do: fix handoffs and single points of failure the org chart will never show you.
Content intelligence: visual and human beats frequent and corporate
Posts with video and images reach 86% of their audience against the 63.5% average. And when we ranked the year's posts, the top five were all personal: two promotions, a new baby, two farewells. The winner, a promotion announcement, hit 92 likes, 87 comments, and 97.9% reach - roughly five times the average engagement and twenty times the average comments.
Two craft lessons in one dataset. Format decides whether a message gets seen, and humanity decides whether it gets felt. Employees don't engage with corporate updates. They engage with each other. Tom King, our APAC lead in Sydney, has pushed the format lesson furthest: his video posts average 40.5 likes, 2.6 times his non-video engagement, and they're how Australian customer stories reach a head office sixteen time zones away.
There's a structural version of this lesson too. Sales averages 47 likes per post, the highest of any team, posting almost exclusively about customer wins and launches. Product & Engineering posts four times more, but half of it is 3,000-character essays to audiences of about 11 people. What looks like one team beating another is really customer stories beating internal detail. That's content architecture, not a popularity contest.
What you can see: which formats and stories actually land with your workforce.
What you can do: plan the next campaign on evidence, not instinct.
Culture intelligence: culture leaves a data trail
66 different people published last month, in a company of 132. Half the organization creates, not just consumes. Behind them: 113,232 chat messages, roughly 15,000 reactions, and 19 active content categories from Engineering to People & Talent to Compliance.
Recognition tells the sharper story. It lives in four places at Blink: our weekly all-hands, our quarterly IMPACT awards, everyday thanks in chat, and an in-app recognition feature used about five times a month. The in-app feature being the smallest channel doesn't mean we don't recognize people. It means the data shows precisely which surface a culture uses, not whether it holds the value. Blink iQ flagged the imbalance; humans decide what to do about it. That's the right division of labor, and we're publishing the finding on purpose. An analytics product that only surfaces flattering patterns isn't an analytics product.
Even the trivia carries the point. One developer accounts for 39% of every laughing-face emoji the company has ever sent. Our VP of Customer Success owns 95% of the purple hearts. Individually, curiosities. Collectively, proof that the platform is a precise record of how a workforce actually sounds.
What you can see: who creates, who's recognized, and who's gone quiet.
What you can do: reach the people slipping through months before a survey would find them. Belonging used to be a twice-a-year questionnaire. Now it's observable, continuously.
What this means at the scale our customers run
None of these findings is dramatic at 150 people. The patterns visible at our size are interesting but partial.
At customer scale, the same six lenses (and more!) run on millions of employees, with hundreds of locations and tens of thousands of frontline shifts a week.
There, the patterns aren't partial. Influence intelligence finds the shift supervisor whose safety posts actually get read. Workflow intelligence finds the handoff between regions that's held together by one deputy manager. Culture intelligence finds the site that's gone quiet three months before turnover spikes.
That's the product we built. It runs on the Blink platform every customer already uses, and it does at workforce scale exactly what we just did to ourselves at a smaller one.
Data: Blink's own organization, twelve months of internal usage (May 2025 to May 2026), queried May 2026. All-time volume figures cover the full twelve years since the org was created in November 2014. Platform adoption figures cover the last 30 days. Named individuals consented to inclusion.
.png)
