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Hearsay Social, like LexBlog, serving professionals’ social media needs

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September 4, 2014

Over the last year or two, I’ve been following Hearsay Social which offers a web based social media solution for financial professionals.

Hearsay, now five years old and backed by Sequoia Venture Capital, is making a real dent in the financial vertical. You may even call them the social media company of record for that industry.

Like LexBlog’s having the privilege of serving over 80 of the 200 largest law firms in the country, Hearsay is serving over 90,000 financial professionals in large organizations such as Vanguard, New York Life and Pacific Life.

You can only be impressed by Clara Shih (@clarashih), Hearsay’s CEO and Founder, who in 2007 developed the first business application on Facebook called Faceconnector. Since then she’s authored The New York Times-featured bestseller, The Facebook Era: Tapping Social Networks to Market, Sell, and Innovate, and been elected to the Starbucks board of directors in 2011, replacing Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

While LexBlog empowers lawyers to network online through the in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content of a blog, Hearsay’s focus is leveraging the networking, relationship, and visibility building power of other social media, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

I like to say LexBlog takes lawyers back to the future of business development. Relationships and word of mouth, just accelerated through the Internet. Hearsay does much the same by taking financial services back to its roots of deepening relationships with clients and extending their reach within local communities.

From Shih in a press release this week:

Being active on social media brings firms and intermediaries back to what the financial services industry has always been about: listening to people, understanding their dreams, and guiding some of their most important and impactful decisions regarding the future. We’re proud to be fueling the return to that vision with the leading and most innovative financial services and insurance firms in the world.

Similar to LexBlog, Hearsay has focused on a highly regulated niche. Financial professionals hold various forms of licensure, each with regulations covering marketing and sales. Hearsay’s training and technology has enabled advisors and others to use social to engage directly with clients when many viewed regulations prohibiting this.

I remember the early days of introducing a professional turnkey blog solution to lawyers. Not only were each state’s ethical rules brought up as roadblocks, but confidentiality and engagement with clients and prospective were raised as huge liability concerns.

As with Hearsay, education, account managers, technology, and drive from all sides overcame the challenges and brought a safe and powerful online networking solution to individual professionals.

At least a few takeaways for me. One, professionals, whether financial or legal, need to use social media to be successful today. Engagement, relationships, trust, and word of mouth are all keys to business dvelopment success. The net and social drive these in an online world.

Two, professionals can leverage blogs and other social media while still complying with regulations governing sales, marketing, and personal engagement.

And three, outsourcing technology, systems, education, and support to companies with social and niche expertise makes great sense for professional services businesses. Professionals can then focus on what’s most important, engagement, relationships, and word of mouth knowing they’ll be in compliance and realize a return on their investment of their social efforts.

I look forward to meeting some of the folks from Hearsay soon. I’m impressed with their approach.

H/T Janet Levaux (Think_JanetL) my source for this post.