Hearsay Social is a social networking service for companies that have large, local sales staffs or nationwide store networks. It's especially useful to help companies in regulated industries achieve employee compliance with corporate branding policies and various government regulations. The main product is online software that's sold to companies as a service.
Local, Local, Local
Hearsay Social is designed to be particularly helpful to big corporations and franchises that have a lot of different local branches or local groups with agents, representatives, store managers --or other local employees who want to establish their own social media presence, develop customer relationships via social media channels and nurture local online communities.
Hearsay Social helps big businesses manage those local social media relationships by offering employee training in social media, monitoring of social media to find unauthorized or problematic communications, and soical media analytics tools to measure results and what's happening in all the local social media channels.
Hearsay also offers a platform for companies to find suitable content that their local agents and representatives can tap into to develop effective social media messages. The "content exchange" includes RSS feeds from various news providers.
The company likes to explain its utility by saying its software adds a layer on top of popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook with tools to encourages compliance with corporate guidelines and legal requirements for branding and governance issues.
Hearsay Social Roots
Hearsay Local is based in San Francisco. It was co-founded in 2009 by Steve Garrity by Clara Shih, who is the author of a book titled "The Facebook Era."
Among its high profile customers are State Farm and Farmers Insurance, in part because the insurance industry is big on local marketing through agents--which is what Hearsay's social media tools are optimized for.
Hearsay Social also works closely with social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter Gooogle+ and FourSquare.
Hearsay Social has a lot of competitors in the increasingly crowded field of enterprise social networking services. Yammer is one of the leading social networking services for businesses, but it doesn't offer the same kind of monitoring features designed to ensure regulatory compliance.
Other companies that offer some of the same services, especially embedded analytics, or social media monitoring or social marketing. These include:
- Socialware (financial service, social media compliance)
- GroSocial(social media monitoring)
- 37 Signals(Social collaboration for small business)
- Prosodic(Audience analytics)