When national and global businesses go social, they often bring with them a whole fleet of Facebook and Twitter pages operated by their local sales representatives, agents, and store managers.
One problem with tapping into the power of all these free social media services is that managing them properly can get very complicated and expensive. That's particularly true for organizations that are serious about maintaining a consistent brand identity or ensuring regulatory compliance across the network. Yet clamping down on these locally managed pages and insisting on central corporate management of everything would be a big mistake.
"The power of corporate/local is in the local market knowledge, reach, and customer connections -- that's why you invest having agents in local offices and stores," says Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Corp., which is coming out of "stealth mode" and unveiling its Hearsay Social product today.
I've written about Shih before, as the author of The Facebook Era and an exponent of the idea that businesses would do better to engage with customers within services like Facebook where they feel comfortable, rather than making them click away to another website (How Facebook Changes Marketing And Sales). She first explored the possibilities of creating software for social media business scenarios in 2007, while working for Salesforce.com and cooked up one of the first Facebook business apps as a weekend project -- a connector between Facebook and the customer relationship management service. After leaving Salesforce to start Hearsay, she was able to hire a serious engineering team to tackle the problem more thoroughly and at a scale sufficient for corporate customers.
Hearsay Social tries to strike a balance between central control and local autonomy. A brand manager at headquarters can push out tweets or status posts, but the local folks can customize them or submit their own posts into the system for approval. Part of the point of building personal relationships on the local level is for the locals to show some personality, something that wouldn't be achieved by making them robotically redistribute the latest corporate press releases.
On the other hand, companies in regulated industries need to filter and monitor these social channels to make sure nothing is published that would put them out of compliance. The Hearsay Social tool can also monitor for profanity and other sensitive topics the company might not want to be associated with.
Customers in all industries also get tools for monitoring social media activity globally (see illustration of the metrics below) and posting to multiple services simultaneously. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, Hearsay has a deal with LinkedIn that includes access to some application programming interfaces that are only available to selected partners, for functions like access to the service's internal messaging system.
Early Hearsay Social customers include State Farm Insurance and 24 Hour Fitness.
The video Hearsay prepared for the announcement dramatizes the concept nicely:
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsupAdjvt5s[/embed]
