Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: At that time when you were going through this thought evolution, I imagine you must have done some competitive analysis. All these companies like RightNow and people who came at it from the customer service side were also discovering that they needed to do this. They need to support customer service from the coming out of the social media channels. They were putting in gear solutions for that. How does that impact your thought process?

Joshua March: The prediction that I made using the framework of Innovator’s Dilemma was that all these companies will probably talk about social, but none of them would really invest in it in the way that was needed to create the product. Traditional customer service like email, phone, and live chat all have essentially the same framework and the same work flow process. They’re one-on-one private interactions between an agent and a customer where every single interaction that comes in is a service request. It’s all in platforms that are controlled by the company. Social media comes along and it’s completely different. First off, and most importantly, it’s no longer a private channel. A lot of it is public. It’s on a third-party platform, so it’s not controlled by the company. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you find?

Joshua March: Many things. Like I said, we took this agile approach where we said, “What’s the simplest and fastest thing that we can do to start testing this out and start learning?” We sat down and built a Facebook page moderation tool. We had all these big brands and agencies who had these pages but were struggling to manage that. We can build a simple tool in a couple of months. We worked very quickly to do that. The result was awesome. There were a lot of brands who really loved it. So we kept building and developing.

Sramana Mitra: Did you give this product out for free?

Joshua March: Yes. We were just focused on learning at that time. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in 2009?

Joshua March: In 2009, we suddenly find ourselves with this prospering agency. In 2008, I managed to pay off all of my debts and move into my apartment. I never set out to build an agency. I was much more excited by the possibility of building a software product that we could scale up. That was the original vision, but we were sidetracked by this awesome opportunity. I still had this vision of building a big business. I was also thinking a lot about the future. Are Facebook apps still going to be around in couple of years? I was not sure. At that time, I didn’t think that Facebook believed they were the future of the Internet. Although there was a lot of excitement around the applications and the campaign, I felt like a lot of that was because it was the latest. It was exciting and innovative, but I wasn’t really sure how much of it was tied to fundamental business value. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Conversocial CEO Joshua March (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did that mean? You wanted to build products using the Facebook API. Did you have an idea what kind of a product you were going to build?

Joshua March: Facebook wasn’t the ruler of the world just yet. Myspace was still big. The consultancy gig that we were doing allowed us to do stuff on Facebook and also on these other social networks. It wasn’t completely clear that Facebook was going to dominate the world. Whilst we were doing these consultancy gigs on the side, my business partner Dan and I had the idea of building this product that would enable you to write an application once and then launch it on all of the social networks at the same time. We started working on that product while we were doing a lot of these Facebook gigs. It wasn’t big money at that time but there was a lot of people who were interested in it. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What other things have you seen in the social media performance measurement space in general that are worthy of note?

Clara Shih: More broadly in social media, outside of sales, the easiest is if you’re an e-commerce provider because you can trace directly the fact that someone clicked on a post or a paid ad inside of Facebook or Twitter. That’s the most direct way. There have been correlation studies done between the fact that consumer is a fan of your Facebook page or a follower of yours and on whether that’s an indicator of a more loyal client who spends more. Also, on the customer service side, there’s a number of companies now that handle customer service questions and issues over Twitter. They found that it can be more efficient, and it can actually save in terms of customer call center volume. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: FullBottle CEO Reed Berglund (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What I see is that the bigger disruption is in looking for systematic ways of being able to compensate influencers.

Reed Berglund: That’s one way of looking at it, absolutely. If you examine the initial goal for these influencers on these platforms, they were free platforms. They went on from a hobby standpoint. In many cases, they wanted to use it to market their own skill set whether that’s music, film, or art, but they didn’t approach it with, “I can actually make some money doing this.” To clear the market, there was definitely a need for a mechanism.

Sramana Mitra: How much money can an influencer, who participates in your campaign, expect to make in your sweet spot?

Reed Berglund: It depends on where that influencer is and the life cycle of their influence, if you will. For folks who have 250,000 to 500,000 followers on a platform, they can make anywhere between $1,000 to $2,000 per campaign. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: To all of the connections, that’s not necessarily trigger-driven. The trigger is coming from one particular person.

Clara Shih: We can identify patterns across their networks. Insurance agents tend to have peer groups and sell to customers similar to their age range. You see these clusters of people, typically around 30 or 40, who all suddenly get engaged in the same amount of time. If you see many of the same signals in your network, you can share. Then, there’s just good general knowledge content that agents like to share like earthquake readiness, or winterizing your home before the storms come. There’s a general content that’s engaging to a wide population of people. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Does that naturally break down your business into the kinds of insurance or products that you’re helping sell to? For example, marriage, engagement, or having a baby as opposed to cars or something that has a less pervasive presence on social media?

Clara Shih: A lot of people share photos of their new car also. Maybe, they’re more boastful. As a company, we have chosen to focus on insurance and financial services. I think it’s part of a broader trend that you’re seeing of the rise of vertical SaaS companies. SaaS is becoming a more pervasive delivery model. We’re able to provide much deeper customization for each industry and that allows us to focus and drive greater value to that industry. >>>