Slashdot Mirror
Big Brother Friends Facebook
storagedude writes "Clara Shih, who created the first business app on Facebook in 2007, is back with a new venture: Hearsay Social, which makes Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn more palatable to corporations by adding features like SEC and FINRA monitoring and compliance and analytics. Conversations are monitored around the clock, regardless of where employees access pages from — work, home or mobile — and workflow tools let companies approve or suggest content before it appears. Those features appear to be making financial companies a little more comfortable Facebooking, as State Farm and Farmers Insurance are two early customers. Shih is backed in the new venture by veterans of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube."
This is what "free" as in "free market" is supposed to look like, right?
State Farm and Farmers Insurance are two early customers
The biggest incentive was the presence of FarmVille as new market niche, but until know not enough support for the employees to create a coherent sale pitch for this segment. Now, this is possible... loud an clear... mooo!
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Shih said the service is particularly well-suited to companies that have franchises and branch offices that want to provide a local flavor to their Facebook content, but also must comply with corporate rules and leverage content from corporate and other users in the system.
In other words, they get to approve all comments made on not only their facebook page, but any of their local franchises, or the local users of those franchises. So if I go to my local McDonalds and get crappy service and decided to later post that on the local McDonalds facebook page, the corporate office AND the local franchise would have to approve my message before it was displayed for others to see.
I've been concerned for a while now that my corporate overlords haven't had enough access to my personal life or to monitor me during my personal time. I have already given them access to GPS on my phone, my personal e-mail, and my Facebook account - so I would be happy for them to automate this so my wonderful employers can, at a click of a button, see me every minute of every day, and so we can both work together to prevent negative thoughts or words that might impact my performance or more seriously the companies image.
/., I realise it was expensive for PR and legal to sign off on its wording and I will work to pay back the costs it incurred the company (by having them take it out of my pay each month).
I would also like to thank my boss, Mr. Smith, for allowing me to post this message to
FTFA, all it sounds like is a workflow system for controlling what can be done through a company's official presence(s) on Facebook. For example, it allows managers to moderate both employees handling those presences and other Facebook users trying to post on their wall, etc.
How is that "big brother?" That's almost like calling Slashdot comment moderation a form of Stalinist repression (when we all know, that label rightly belongs to Digg)
That's the whole idea. You don't want you sales rep using their personal facebook page for your marketing and mixing it in with their drunken adventures in Bangkok. You want them to use a facebook profile just for their work - but now you run into compliance issues since what they say is clearly said as part of your company.
And the sales rep likely doesn't want to have all their annoying as shit clients as friends on their personal facebook page either. So win-win.
I'm someone who's only been to Facebook a few times, due to Google searches taking me there. I understand that it's a social site for people to post information about themselves and communicate with friends who use the service. I don't understand it when I see a product saying "Come visit us on Facebook!". Is this just a glorified web page? Why not just put up a website for your company, and let people link to it? Maybe it's like software APIs or something, where the company's Facebook page is a sort of wrapper that makes their interface match that of other Facebook users?
Before you all jump on the bandwagon, this is about monitoring and being involved in the workflow of company accounts, not controlling what employees say on their personal accounts. I cannot see anything bad about this and in fact when I first saw it yesterday I thought it was a nice business idea.
Effectively it is for companies with local branches (like a franchise) where head office wants some control over the official social media accounts of their sub-branches or franchisees. It means branches can run their own social media marketing, but head office can be involved in the workflow to ensure it fits in with corporate policy and marketing.
I'm sure its open to abuse, but what isn't?