Audio File:& Download MP3Transcript:& Interview with Clara Shih & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & [intro music] & Lucy Sanders:& & & & Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for& Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT. Over the last few& years, we've been interviewing women who have started technology& companies and have just had the greatest time talking to them about& the fabulous things they're doing, getting all kinds of wonderful& advice for entrepreneurs. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Hi,& Larry. & Larry Nelson: I'm happy to be here. This is a great series. We know it's had a& great impact on a number of young women. Bosses, parents and the& like. & Lucy: Wow. We've got a great interview today. It's a really fascinating& interview with a woman who's not only started a technology company,& but also is a best-selling author. Clara Shih, who is the founder& and CEO of Hearsay Social. Her book, "The Facebook Era." We all& know we're living in the Facebook era. In fact, my mother-in-law& follows all the status of the family, all the time, on her& grandkids' Facebook accounts.& Hearsay Social is in this really interesting space in social media.& I know Clara will set us straight when we're talking to her, but& here is my sense of what it was. When I was working in corporate,& we would have customer relationship management systems, where& individual sales people, marketing people, could keep track of& customers.& The system itself, the platform itself, would actually do a lot of& the heavy lifting of that in sort of a systematized way, so that& the company's brand was well represented by those sales people andmarketing people.& In this age of social networking, we have a lot of big franchise& kinds of businesses that are busy developing local relationships& through social media with individuals. Yet at the same time, doing& it in an ad hoc way is not really particularly always supportive of& that company's brand. So Hearsay Social is a company that is really& trying to take that on by building a platform.& So Clara, I hope I didn't get that too wrong, but we're really& happy to have you here. Why don't you give us a sense of what's& going on at Hearsay Social today? & Clara Shih: Thank you so much for having me. Hearsay Social is the fastest-growing social media start-up right now. We're based in Silicon& Valley. We just opened an office in New York. We have 60 employees& and growing every day. We were cash-flow positive last year. We've& recently raised $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia and New& Enterprise Associates.& Things have never been better for us. We're thrilled to be part of& helping to lead the social media revolution that's sweeping& business. & Lucy: Give us an example. What would a Starbucks or a company like& Starbucks do with a platform like Hearsay Social? & Clara: We focus at Hearsay Social on corporate-to-local companies that are& brands that have a corporate presence combined with location.& Whether it's State Farm, or 24-Hour Fitness, or McDonald's, you've& got all these local employees and agents out there representing& your brand.& Increasingly, in a highly-decentralized that we're seeing from& Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Foursquare and now Google& Plus, we're seeing the local representatives and employees actually& create their own pages, either to interact directly with customers,& or because customers are checking in to specific locations using& their iPhone or Android location-enabled device to kind of manage all of these local& profiles and activity that are going on.& Hearsay Social is all about, first, helping the chief marketing& officer get a handle on who all in their organization is even& engaging in these customer conversations at the local level, and& then from there being able to push out corporate-approved ma