Clara Shih, founder and CEO of Hearsay Labs, kicked off the social CRM movement in 2007 with her Faceconnector application, which integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM. Faceconnector was the first business application on Facebook. Clara is credited for helping evolve thinking about Facebook from "just for fun" only to a serious platform with business potential.
She is author of the bestseller, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff about Facebook and Twitter for business, which has been featured in The New York Times, AdAge, CRM Magazine, and is being used as a textbook at Stanford and Harvard Business School. Her latest book, Social Business Imperative, the sequel to her first book The Facebook Era, encourages companies to adapt to today's customer not only with new Twitter handles but with entirely new business models.
The Facebook Era is a practical guide for executives and professionals who wish to understand social technologies like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn and how to take advantage of them for sales, marketing, and innovation. The book likens the "Facebook revolution" to the emergence of the internet in the 1990s. Shih says the internet revolution was marked by the World Wide Web of information and the power of linking content pages. Today, we are seeing the World Wide Web of people emerge across the social graph of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites. She predicts the business impact will be on the same scale as with the internet.
Clara comes from a background of online advertising at Google and CRM at Salesforce.com, where she was most recently Product Line Director of the AppExchange. Clara recently left her position as at salesforce.com to found Hearsay Labs, which provides social media tools enabling marketers to manage customer engagements across Facebook, Twitter, and their own websites.
Clara has degrees in computer science, economics, and internet studies from Stanford and Oxford. She is a frequently invited keynote speaker on social media marketing at global conferences including Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0, Toronto TechWeek, and Social Ad Summit.