Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I’m sure social media are creating whole new opportunities for your business. Why don’t we explore that, especially if you have specific customer examples?

Penny Herscher: There are two aspects that are social that are really impacting the workflow of the sales and marketing person. The first is, obviously, social media content. Twitter is the one that I’ll talk about. The second is the adoption of what people call the social enterprise, the ability to collaborate efficiently inside a social enterprise system like Chatter, on top of Salesforce or Jive.

On the social media content side, what we do is we have this capability called First Tweets, which analyzes the Tweet stream. We see the Tweet stream, and we analyze it for the business content. So, the first thing we do is get rid of everything that we can see is not business related, which is a fairly simple step. And then we do a very detailed step, which is to analyze the Tweets to figure out what they’re about and what aspect of the business they’re related to. We end up with less than one-tenth of a percent of the Tweet stream that’s actually relevant to business. We deliver that into the same workflow that I described, into the CRM, onto your iPad, onto your phone. It’s interesting that when you analyze Twitter, you get a different view on the market from when you analyze traditional web content, such as articles and blogs. When people write Tweets, they become much more pithy. To take a thought, an observation, or a piece of news and distill it into 140 characters changes the nature of what you communicate in an interesting way. What we do is analyze it and then deliver it alongside of the news. So, you can either see the analyzed content of blog posts or industrial industry articles about, for example, some new injectable just getting regulatory approval. Then you’ll see an article, and then you’ll see a Tweet. When you see them both, you have a different sense of the momentum and nature of the change that’s occurred. We deliver that into the workflow.

We also deliver it directly into the social enterprise. So, you can take a Tweet stream that’s very narrow. It’s just about business content, and you can drop it into Chatter. That way, your salespeople never have to go to Twitter. They don’t have to load up HootSuite or TweetDeck. You can feel confident that they have social media in their intelligence stream, but in a way that’s efficient. So, they see maybe four Tweets a day on Chevron. But they know what’s changed with Chevron’s business. It’s more than filtered. It’s analyzed so that by the time you see the Tweet, you know why you’re seeing it. There might be 10,000 Tweets, and we deliver five. It’s that level of precision.

SM: When you talk about the salesperson dealing with leads, before, all you needed to do was monitor your email console, and you knew who was trying to get in touch with you. Now, you have to monitor everything. You have to monitor Facebook, Twitter direct messages, and the Twitter stream itself because people are actually talking to you on the Twitter stream.

PH: We don’t solve that problem. We’re not trying to solve the problem of your using Twitter as a communication mechanism. Most salespeople don’t want to do that because they don’t have time. They do want to know that they didn’t miss any news about their customers.

SM: So, this is more news oriented.

PH: We look at the whole stream, but we take out everything that is not a business development about your customer.

SM: I see.

PH: Again, it’s not replacing Twitter as a communication vehicle but using as a source of intelligence about your customer’s marketplace. It’s particularly important if you’re trying to understand an industry. Imagine that you’re trying to understand a particular vertical. You sell nephrology drugs, and you’re trying to understand every development in nephrology.

SM: I got what you’re saying. Where I’m surprised by that answer is that if I’m the salesperson, how many of these tools do I need to do my job? You are giving me the tool to stay on top of the intelligence.

PH: We give you the intelligence, and it doesn’t feel like a tool because it’s integrated into your other workflows. As a salesperson, you don’t think, gosh, I’d better go get FirstRain. You think, oh, I’m looking at my account page in Jive, and one of the things on my account page is the intelligence about Chevron.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain
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