Targeted listening informs business on social

About two months ago, I started a new role as head of strategic alliances for Hearsay Social, a company that provides social media management for sales and marketing teams. We particularly focus on financial services markets like insurance, and wealth management.

While there are other companies that focus on various aspects of social media management, Hearsay Social stands out for several reasons:

1)   Focus on using social for business: I teach a course on B2B social media and the one question I get time and time again is how to use social to support business goals. Many people understand the great value social provides communications, branding and customer support; but how to use social for other aspects of business is not well understood. Hearsay addresses that problem head-on.

2)   Industry expertise: Social is hard. It is a new industry, a new medium, and figuring it out can be tricky. Financial services is hard. It is a regulated environment and a couple of misplaces statements can land you in big trouble with regulators. Hearsay demystifies the complex web of social networks and makes them safe and useable for people in highly regulated environments.

3)   “Hear” is as important as “Say”: Before anyone goes out to market and sell using social, you need to be aware of what is going on in your social graph. At Hearsay, the “Hear” part is targeted social listening only on a user’s direct connections, and not the entire social universe. By being more targeted, Hearsay helps a user find a particular social signal that may trigger a customer call, which is the “Say” part

I’m really excited to be part of the Hearsay Social team and I’ll have more to update in the coming months. While Hearsay’s approach to social is somewhat different than what I teach about in Company is the Content, the two are very complimentary. So it will be interesting (for me anyway) to see how my work in one informs and influences my work in the other.