Sit down. Brace yourself. I have big news. Today is the day that social media officially becomes enterprise-ready.
The first social media "aha" moment for brand marketers is realizing their customers are on social. Over the last few months, brand marketers have gotten wiser and more sophisticated. Now, they are realizing that their own people are on social media sites representing the brand. We are all too familiar with the viral video capturing a rogue Domino's Pizza employee who blew his nose into a pizza before handing it to a customer.
The opportunities for such brand mishaps are growing by the day. Increasingly, consumers donning iPhones and Android devices expect to be able to "check in" using their smartphones on local Facebook Place Pages and Foursquare Places. Increasingly, we are moving toward a world where there is potentially one or more social media presences for every physical store location or local rep.
Corporate-to-local brands such as Starbucks or State Farm can't realistically centrally manage these tens of thousands of local pages, nor would doing so be effective. Successful local engagement comes from authentic, personal connection. The challenge becomes how to empower local while protecting the brand and addressing compliance concerns.
At Hearsay Social, we have taken four years of social media research and thought leadership and are thrilled today to unveil three game-changing innovations that will transform your local store employees and reps from a liability into an asset for the brand.
1. Integrated Social Campaigns: This new feature allows corporate marketers to package Facebook tabs, posts, ads, tweets, and LinkedIn status updates into a single integrated campaign that launches at the local level with the click of a mouse. Targeting and timing of the campaign can be pre-specified at the corporate level, removing the burden to log in and manage the campaign each day from time-strapped local reps.
2. Regional Management Console: Since many corporations have numerous management levels and structures, we have expanded administration access to the district level with customizable hierarchies, roles, and entitlements. This allows, for example, a regional manager to see a rollup of all of the locations in his/her territory, provide localized content, and see the engagement metrics associated with the district.
Best practices from the field: One customer using this feature in beta empowered their regional managers to localize content and included social performance in their management reports. This distributed approach resulted in a doubling of fans for the organization over just a few short months.
For one organization, we identified over 1,000 instances of their brand on Facebook, many of which were from employees within their organization. They wanted to celebrate the success already achieved and used the opportunity to reward top performers.
I'm also incredibly excited to announce that we have secured $18 million in Series B financing from NEA and Sequoia Capital. This funding will enable Hearsay Social to deliver even more groundbreaking innovations even faster so that you can rest assured that your brand will be protected, local conversations will take place, and your customers will be engaged for years to come.
Now, it's back to work for us. Let me know your thoughts and how we can help you at [email protected]!
