Los Angeles — Steering a corporation is not easy, and with all of your employees flocking to Facebook, things can become pretty complicated. That is a question that has been tossed about for years as a growing number of organizations have hoped to leverage the popularity of the social networking site that has exploded to more than 500 million users worldwide. Fortunately, Hearsay, with a blend of social media management platform, has formally announced new product for corporate clients to manage their presence in social media.
Hearsay, a startup promoted by Sequoia Capital, is emerging from stealth mode today and unveiling its first social media platform for companies that have both corporate brands and local representatives, with existing customers such as Farmers Insurance, State Farm and 24 Hour Fitness.
The new Hearsay Social, a service that assists large corporations manage the social media presence of their local branches and franchises also provides full integration with the LinkedIn API.
The newly launched San Francisco-based Hearsay Social lets its customers manage in accordance with brand guidelines as well as ordinances from the SEC, FINRA and the FTC. Hearsay Social provides a dashboard to manage content, workflow and compliance as well as analytics. Corporations can now manage all of their local branch Facebook pages and track what sort of performance each is having through robust analytics tools (some of which are pictured below).
Out of those 15,000 agents who received the local Hearsay administration tools, more than 90 percent fourfold their number of Facebook fans and increased user feedback by 500 percent in the first 60 days. It also helps these types of companies push out social media content for their local representatives to personalize, and analyze the effectiveness of their efforts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Interestingly, Hearsay co-founder and CEO Clara Shih, formulated the first business application for Facebook in 2007 called “FaceForce” that gathered Facebook profile information into the Salesforce CRM system. She is also the author of the recently updated book “The Facebook Era.”
“Every conversation I had while devising FaceForce and writing the book reinforced the idea that Facebook is like the Internet was a decade earlier and it is changing the nature of relationships,” Shih, said in a statement. “There are tremendous opportunities, but big companies say they need better tools to automate their use of social media and integrate with their existing systems. They get excited by the opportunities but compliance and other issues are a daunting challenge, especially in regulated industries.”
Shih explained that the service is especially well-suited to companies that have franchises and branch offices that tends to deliver a local flavor to their Facebook content, but also must comply with corporate rules and leverage content from corporate and other users in the system.
“We found it is really easy to create things like a Facebook fan page, but it is extremely difficult to maintain with fresh content and that reflects badly on the brand,” said Shih.
Moreover, companies think it is great each branch has its own Facebook Page or Twitter account, but they need to make sure that those accounts match the broader company message, and in some cases they are legally required to archive that content too.
Hearsay raised a little more than $3 million in funding last March in a round by Sequoia Capital. Other investors are Michael Abbott (Twitter), Steve Chen (YouTube), Ron Conway (SV Angel), Nils Johnson, David Lawee (Google), Thomas Layton (former OpenTable), Dave Morin (Path), Patrick Pohlen (Latham & Watkins), Alberto Savoia (Google), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) and Aaron Sittig (former Facebook).