local status updates or tweets. “It gives the ability for corporate not to control, but to seed the local conversation, and make it easy for local branches and representatives to look smart,” Shih says.
In the compliance area, Hearsay’s tools provide basic filtering, to make sure that local representatives don’t broadcast anything that includes profanity, personally identifiable information, or blacklisted expressions. For regulatory compliance, for example, insurance companies generally don’t want their agents talking with customers about stocks, bonds, and other investment matters.
Finally, Hearsay’s social media portal provides each company and each branch representative with analytics dashboards, so they can see how many friends or followers they have and how many people are retweeeting tweets on Twitter or “Liking” status updates on Facebook. There are also built-in customer relationship management tools that allow branch representatives to track and annotate individual friends, fans, and followers. “An insurance agent will do this for the hottest leads or customers,” Shih explains. “You might scroll down and see the history of your interactions–when Chris became a fan of your page, the notes you’ve taken about him, the fact that his son is turning 16 next week and will need insurance.”
The one thing Hearsay can’t measure, of course, is whether this blur of social media activity translates into actual sales. But Shih says the company’s customers don’t really need convincing on that score. “Businesses recognize the inherent value in relationships and loyalty,” she says. “When insurance agents send you a holiday card, they’re not tracking that back to whether you buy more premium products. They’re just investing in the relationship. That same set of values motivates them to get on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter.”
Shih was motivated to start Hearsay by her experiences writing The Facebook Era, a 2009 book about the business uses of the social Web. Back in 2007, while still a marketing executive at San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, Shih had built Faceforce (later renamed Faceconnector), an app that allowed Salesforce users to pull updates from their contacts’ Facebook profiles into their Salesforce records. Hailed as the first real business application ever created for Facebook, Faceforce brought Shih tremendous attention, as well as the book contract, which led to a year of research on the social media landscape.
“A lot of the companies I spoke to wanted the same things, and that made me think there was a good opportunity to build a software company to address these common needs,” Shih recounts. So in mid-2009, she left Salesforce and persuaded a former Stanford classmate, Steve Garrity, to leave his own job as a cloud and mobile program manager at Microsoft to co-found the company, which started out under the name Hearsay Labs.
Today, the 30-employee startup already has more than 30,000 users at a bevy of high-profile client firms, including State Farm, Farmers Insurance, and 24 Hour Fitness. In fact, the company is cash-flow positive, Shih says. But that didn’t stop it from
