The social enterprise space is littered with exciting companies. Stop me if you've heard this pitch: "We're like Facebook, but for the enterprise." So it's often hard to sort out the differences between all of these companies, and which is in the best position to help your organization reach its goals--which, by the way, are just as complex (internal collaboration, customer relationships, sentiment analytics and so on).

We've been inviting many of these companies to come pitch us--on stage, with video demonstrations and more. Hearsay Social is firmly rooted in enterprise social, and it is also firmly rooted in helping sales organizations and other business entities engage with customers using traditional, public-facing social media, with the typical controls you'd expect in the enterprise. Indeed, Hearsay counts many household names, including some financial services companies, as customers.

Clara Shih, the company's co-founder and CEO, wrote the first Facebook business app (Faceconnector), and then wrote a well-travelled book called "The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Market, Sell, and Innovate," before starting Hearsay, along with co-founder and CTO Steve Garrity.

Garrity recently participated in our startup session at the InformationWeek 500 conference. You can watch it in the video embedded below. But you can also tune into Valley View, our online live web TV show October 24 at 11 am PT and watch him give an even faster-paced elevator pitch, live! (We'll have more startups--including Taptera (enterprise mobile applications) and Alteryx (big data), and we'll feature conversations with Cisco CEO John Chambers and Oracle President Mark Hurd. We'll also feature a special report from CRN, exploring the tech companies that milked U.S. stimulus dollars. You can also register for the October Valley View show and have a chance to win some excellent gear.

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