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.

Sramana Mitra: Changing topics a little bit, social media marketing has obviously become a big part of everybody’s marketing. For us, we only do social media marketing. We mostly do content marketing and then we propagate and amplify that content over social media. What are you seeing in terms of trends vis-à-vis measurements and ROI of that investment? How do you, at Hearsay, provide that kind of metrics and measurement infrastructure and what are you seeing in terms of industry trends?

Clara Shih: That’s a great question. Social media management has come a long way. The way that you would measure social media for customer service or marketing is done differently than how we do it. At Hearsay, we really pioneered an ROI framework, which allows customers correlate social media activities back to sales. Especially when you have human interactions involved, it’s hard because you can’t measure something like an e-commerce transaction. It’s not just one thing that results in someone becoming your client. It’s usually several factors. They might see one of your posts on Facebook. Then they agree to meet with you in person. Then there’s a follow-up call.

What we’ve been able to do is run a set of longitudinal studies where you look at a test group of agents who are active and then over a longitudinal amount of time, maybe six months or a year, you compare them to a control group of agents who are otherwise identical to them in terms of tenure and sales achievement in prior years. You see there’s a lift in the test group. In every case that we’ve run this study, we’ve seen a double-digit lift in sales.

Sramana Mitra: Your measurement is more in terms of measuring the overall impact since you rolled out your technology acknowledging and understanding that there are other things going on, but at least, you are introducing a new process and there is an impact of that process.

Clara Shih: Exactly.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social
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