Hearsay Social Signs Up Northwestern Mutual And Other Financial Firms To Social Media Management Platform

Hearsay Social, a SaaS dashboard for national businesses and their local branches to manage Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter pages, is announcing that a number of financial firms have been added to its customer roster, including Northwestern Mutual, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, and California Casualty, an insurance provider.

Hearsay Social, which launched to the public in February and has raised $21 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, aims to help big brands who have local branches (i.e. Starbucks, BestBuy), manage Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages. Because of the highly distributed nature of some companies that have local branches, managing social media pages for stores or offices that are still in compliance with a company’s regulation is a challenging process.

Hearsay Social is optimized for “corporate/local” enterprises to allow local representatives, agents, advisors, franchisees or store managers to manage social media pages while ensuring local representatives stay in compliance with brand guidelines, and content regulations. The SaaS application puts compliance, workflow, content management and analytics on top of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and most recently, Google+.

For Hearsay, Northwestern Mutual, which will be using Hearsay’s full suite of products, is a huge customer win. The firm announced this week that it has standardized its more than 6,000 FINRA-registered representatives using LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook onto the Hearsay Social platform. Northwestern Mutual

The startup is also announcing that it is debuting new FINRA and SEC compliance capabilities, making it easier for compliance staff to safeguard firm liability at scale. Basically, the Hearsay Social Compliance Module provides complete compliance and coverage for all firm employees on all major networks, no matter their point of access. The platform allows advisors to use social media to build their books while meeting FINRA and SEC regulations on advertising, monitoring, and record retention.

For example, Hearsay is launching continuous monitoring and real-time remediation for infractions. So if anyone posts prohibited words and phrases (e.g. free, guaranteed, profanities), private customer data, stock ticker symbols, and other infractions, these are identified as they happen and automatically deleted or flagged for resolution.

As CEO and founder Clara Shih explains to us, “We are confident in saying we own financial services for social media.” She explains that in particular, the realtime monitoring for infractions is key for financial services compliance. She adds that the company is also seeing adoption across other industries including hotels, auto, and real estate.