Hearsay's announcement last month of Clara's election to the board of Starbucks brought us back together with the CEO and Founder, Clara Shih. We talked about several of the issues near and dear to our readers, especially those who are in charge of major marketing initiative for large enterprises.
What is Hearsay doing to help companies "liberate" their content and contributors and not "strangle" them?
Businesses recognize the importance of governance and brand protection, but true social media ROI is achieved only through authentic engagement. A core pillar of our platform is content publishing and workflow, which allows corporate marketing teams to support local representatives by populating their Hearsay Social Content Library with suggested posts, beautifully designed brand tabs, and viral videos.
Reps log-in, choose which pieces of content they think will resonate with their customer base (they can also view analytics of which posts by their peers have garnered the greatest engagement), and then use the built-in workflow to customize the content with their own voice, images, and text, which is then run against the firm's keyword filters to check that they do not contain forbidden terms.
Although local reps typically are not content producers, by encouraging them to make the content their own and allowing them to create their own posts specifically tailored for their specific client audiences, corporate protects and complies while liberating, supporting, and empowering. It is a great model we have seen work tremendously well across multiple corporate/local industries, not only insurance and banking but also retail and direct selling organizations.
What is being planned to make compliance protocols more responsive?
Another core pillar of our platform, the the Hearsay Social Compliance Module, is the industry's most complete provider of FINRA/SEC compliance and infraction monitoring, records retention, and compliance pre- and post-approval workflow. Hearsay Social is also the only provider of a Rogue Page Finder, which helps ensure any compliance policy and systems that are put in place are actually being applied against all of the social profiles out there, not just ones that have been officially and explicitly reported by employees to corporate.
In order to make the module more responsive, we have both proactive capabilities, like pre-approval workflow, as well as reactive features, like real-time remediation and capturing and archiving. The world-class integration capability built into our platform allows any retained records to be easily exported into a universal archive system that may already be in place for email and instant messaging.
What are the emerging, global trends? Does SOPA or COPPA present new wrinkles and how will Hearsay respond?
The power of social media is tremendous: it has made the world even smaller by allowing everyone on the Internet to connect with the people, brands, and causes that matter most to them. For businesses, real-time social sharing cultivates transparency, authenticity, and ultimately customer connection and loyalty. Even negative comments have benefits. For one, negative reviews have been shown to foster trust among e-commerce communities, bringing greater legitimacy to the positive reviews and signaling a brand that is secure and can stand behind their products and service in a truly open forum.
As for SOPA/COPPA, I agree with industry leaders including Google and Facebook that this kind of legislation can have unintended consequences and is not the best solution. Free markets have shown over time that they can help mitigate these kinds of challenges. While well-intentioned, the opportunity for abuse during the implementation of such legislation is too great. Especially in times like these, as a society we cannot adopt legislation that would risk stifling innovation and entrepreneurship - indeed, more than ever, we need an open Internet to drive technological progress and productivity for the global economy.