Hearsay

About

Hearsay provides a SaaS platform that enables regulated enterprises and franchises to manage social and digital communications with compliance controls, workflow/approval, archiving, analytics, and CRM/API integrations.

Mission

Hearsay builds compliant communications tools for heavily regulated financial-services firms, offering email, messaging, websites and a governance layer to ensure auditability. Its customers are primarily banks, insurers, wealth management firms and mortgage providers. The company has created APIs and built-in connectors to share data with CRM and marketing automation systems, beginning with a connector to Salesforce and plans to add other vendors. Hearsay says combining streams of customer data with CRM/CDP tooling enables more intelligent, personalized advisor engagement in the “last mile.” Clara Shih, co-founder and CEO, says the company originated the social selling category when it launched. Financially, Hearsay had previously raised $51 million prior to the announced Salesforce investment. Hearsay Corporation builds Hearsay Social, an enterprise social marketing platform that enables large franchises and regional businesses to engage local customers across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. The product supports regional pages and local employee representatives while giving corporate teams controls such as profanity alerts, post editing, and company-wide updates. The company recently unveiled integrated social campaigns, a regional management console, and a rogue page finder to locate unauthorized brand pages. Hearsay counts major customers including State Farm, Farmers Group, and 24 Hour Fitness and says demand has been phenomenal since its February launch. CEO Clara Shih said the company expects both headcount and the number of users it serves to double by year-end; proceeds will be used for hiring, accelerating growth, and new products. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley and maintains offices in New York and Ohio. Hearsay offers a SaaS dashboard that lets corporate and local branch users manage Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts with compliance, workflow, content management, and analytics. The central dashboard includes message archiving, keyword flagging and filtering, workflow and approval capabilities, and region/sub-region analytics. Local branch users get suggested campaigns, a 360-degree view of Facebook fans, LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers, posting tools, and compliance checks such as profanity filters. Hearsay has a partnership and full integration with LinkedIn's messaging API and a LinkedIn sales and marketing collaboration. The product targets franchise-style businesses and regulated industries—such as financial services—where corporate policy and compliance limit social media adoption. The company says it's rolling out to more than 30,000 users at customers including State Farm, Farmers Insurance Group of Companies, and 24 Hour Fitness. Hearsay was founded by Clara Shih and Steve Garrity.

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