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.

Sramana Mitra: All of those are great. The one thing that I want to call out on the e-commerce issue is that right now, something like 60% of all retail sales are influenced by online behaviour such as online sharing, discovery, and research. While the direct correlation of actually completing the transaction on the web or on mobile device is measurable, the broader impact of social media or on commerce in general is not as measurable.

Clara Shih: If you look back on the sales people use case, the corporate executive board did a study last year. They showed that 57% of a buyer’s decision has already been made before the prospect even wants to talk to the sales person. Whether it’s social media or other online sources, there’s definitely a huge impact.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take this conversation and do a thought experiment. Let’s extrapolate what may be some of the open areas that you would point entrepreneurs to work on. This whole measurement domain is still kind of early.

Clara Shih: Measurement is one area. Social is really important and it’s been a business-defining technology of our time, but social alone is not enough. One area where Hearsay is heavily investing in now is building those bridges between social media and traditional business processes. There’s a lot of integration and business process re-engineering that has to be done in order for us to fully operationalize the vision of social media and to be able to capitalize on the ROI. That’s another one.

The third area goes back to our earlier discussion about the rise of these vertical companies. Before the cloud delivery model, it just wasn’t possible to provide this depth in terms of industry knowledge and value. Because the cloud has changed all of that, all of a sudden you’re seeing all of these companies. There are still plenty of verticals that are underserved.

Sramana Mitra: Especially at the intersection of cloud, mobile, and social as applied to a particular industry workflow. That is disruptive at many levels.

Clara Shih: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: It’s been great talking to you again after a while. Thank you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social
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