Social media monitoring company Hearsay Social has raised $18 million in new funding led by New Enterprise Associates, along with existing investor Sequoia Capital. The brainchild of Facebook
scholar Clara Shih, "Hearsay Social exists to keep corporations and their employees out of trouble on the Internet and turn social media into [a] source of brand engagement, not
embarrassment," reports VentureBeat.
"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," TechCrunch notes.
A SaaS dashboard for national
businesses and their local branches to manage Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages, the company creates tools to let corporations monitor what their employees' "social lives," while also
training those employees to send out brand messages on a local level.
Remarking on the fact that Hearsay launched just five months ago, All Things Digital adds: "The company also launched new features
including a tracker for ‘rogue pages' that illicitly represent a company's brand."
"Hearsay Social has been catching the eyes of huge global corporations and demand
has been phenomenal," writes VatorNews, citing comments from company CEO Clara
Shih.
"By making the corporate voice more human and relevant, Hearsay Social wants to get corporations to view the Internet as their friend, not their worst nightmare,"
VentureBeat adds.
In conjunction with the funding, NEA partner Jon Sakoda is joining the Hearsay Social Board of Directors. To date, Hearsay Social has raised $21 million in funding.