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. >>>

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. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on this example a bit. Let me ask you a few questions that will clarify how you do it and how much of this is viable. What is the assumption? Are we talking about running these kinds of trigger analysis on Jimmy’s already connected set of friends or are we running this trigger analysis algorithm on a broader set?

Clara Shih: That’s a great question. On Facebook and on LinkedIn, we run this predictive algorithm on your existing connections. This is due to privacy policies. In a more public social network like Twitter where you can follow people without them having to follow you back, we can apply this analysis more broadly. Part of what Hearsay does is, we train our users on how to authentically connect with more people on their network whether those people are existing customers or not. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Is this a venture-funded company or did you take the proceeds from the SmarTeam acquisition and build this organically?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: When it started, I was funding this company myself. We have raised $90 million today from VCs. The last round was $35 million that was announced two weeks ago. We got $35 million from Goldman Sachs to continue scaling our business.

Sramana Mitra: Who are the other VCs in the business?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 5)

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Many people have tried to fix this issue of how to drive collaboration that matters. As you were saying, technology has changed a lot. The real impact of cloud on companies is that it makes companies real time. If I go right now to Salesforce and I look at the report, I will understand now what the status is for this specific second. This was not there before. Of course, there was CRM system. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about inter-departmental bridging essentially. You are talking about CRM servicing the closing of the deal in sales and then you’re introducing a bridge into professional services on actually implementing the deal. There’s a project management and staffing that you’re now bringing into the CRM workflow.

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Absolutely, you got it 100%. This is really building the bridges between departments. Let me give you another example of a bridge that we built. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO of Clarizen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying of course requires a lot of integration with other systems. If you’re talking about customer interactions, then you’re talking about the CRM system. Now we’re talking about some sort of a portal that brings together all of these integration elements?

Avinoam Nowogrodski: Not necessarily, although you’re raising a very good point. We do have an amazing integration, for instance, with Salesforce. Let me describe to you a use case that will clarify this. For instance with regards to CRM, think about an opportunity that is about to be closed at 80% within the Salesforce or the CRM system. We have many companies that are using it this way. Marketo and Bazaarvoice are customers. We have about 25,000 customers. The third biggest bank in the world is using Clarizen. One of the top four auditing companies is using Clarizen in order to run their audit process. Overall, we get a lot of success with the concept that I’m now describing.

>>>