Hearsay Social Delivers Astounding Social Media Results and Risk Mitigation to State Farm

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Hearsay Corporation today announced that State Farm® is already experiencing success with its just-announced social media management platform, Hearsay Social (please see separate Hearsay Social product release). By implementing Hearsay Social, State Farm is enabling its agents to build customer engagement and loyalty on social media while fulfilling corporate brand and regulatory guidelines.

Unprecedented Customer Engagement and Loyalty

Last year, State Farm noticed a growing number of their nearly 18,000 independent agents were beginning to interact with customers and prospects on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Recognizing the need to both address compliance risk and tap into the tremendous marketing opportunity on social media, State Farm has deployed Hearsay Social to thousands of agents, requiring that any agent who wishes to be on social networking sites use Hearsay Social to access these sites.

"Our company was built on relationships and our agents excel at this with their customers and in their communities," said Craig Allen, Vice President Agency at State Farm. "Hearsay empowers our agents to strengthen these relationships on social media while engaging customers and prospects with useful and relevant content. Hearsay also allows us to address the important compliance requirements, which banking and insurance companies need to meet."

Results include achieving full compliance with FINRA 10-06 and other federal regulations, and the ability to enforce good corporate governance. Agents benefit from corporate-approved content suggestions and branded tabs which they can one-click post to their social network profiles, as well as rich social customer relationship management (CRM) functionality to track real-time customer conversations, activities and life events appearing on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

About Hearsay Corporation

Hearsay provides the first comprehensive social media platform for businesses with local branches and representatives. Hearsay Social helps these "corporate/local" organizations centrally measure, manage, and deploy content, compliance, monitoring and analytics across brand and local social media presences including Facebook Pages and Profiles, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts.

Backed by Sequoia Capital, the company was co-founded by former Microsoft executive Steve Garrity and former Google and Salesforce.com executive Clara Shih. In 2007, Shih developed the first business application on Facebook and subsequently authored the New York Times-featured bestselling book The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell and Innovate, as well as How to Make Money Marketing Your Business With Facebook, an eBook that is published and distributed by the Financial Times and is available for purchase beginning today.

For more information, please visit us at hearsaysocial.com

About State Farm®

State Farm insures more cars and homes than any other insurer in the U.S., is the leading insurer of watercraft and is also a leading insurer in Canada. Our 17,800 agents and more than 66,000 employees serve 81 million policies and accounts - more than 79 million auto, fire, life and health policies in the United States and Canada, and nearly 2 million bank accounts. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company is the parent of the State Farm family of companies. State Farm is ranked No. 34 on the Fortune 500 list of largest companies. For more information, please visit statefarm.com® or in Canada statefarm.ca®.

Product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks referred to herein are the property of their respective trademark owner.

SOURCE Hearsay Corporation