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Linda Cheung has always been interested in how businesses and markets interact and communicate with one another. Hardly lacking in early influences, Cheung’s entrepreneurial stirrings began as a child as she watched her father run his own business. Perhaps inevitably, she was drawn to the City; for someone interested in global interaction, there could be few places quite so attractive, particularly given the increasing role, technologies such as email and the internet were beginning to play in the country’s financial and business capital. Leaving the London School of Economics with an MSc in economics, Cheung started her career at tax and advisory services firm KPMG – a graduate role that was to be of pivotal importance to the formation of CubeSocial. Encouraging enterprises to make the most of the technological solutions at their disposal has been something of a recurring theme in Cheung’s life: she recalls having a fight on her hands when she wanted to adopt email, with senior members firmly believing the trend would never catch on. For the next 13 years, Cheung called the Morgan Stanley offices her second home. The position gave her plenty of opportunities to flex her entrepreneurial muscles – for example, acting as a key player in the launch of the company’s first ever credit card. However, despite climbing the corporate ladder and securing a chief operating officer title at just 32 years old, Cheung was clearly a chip off the old block. Following in her father’s footsteps, she traded in her suit for jeans and her plush St John’s Wood flat for life in Basingstoke – dubbed jokingly ‘Amazingstoke’ by the entrepreneur – and returned to the grass roots, joining forces with social software veteran and an ex-Microsoft employee Mark Bower. And so CubeSocial was born. A core question for any company providing services to businesses is, ‘What do businesses want?’ After extensive research, Cheung and Bower found that the most important concern for businesses was finding new ways to reach and secure new customers. Together, the two entrepreneurs decided to devise a social CRM for professionals aimed at enabling the user to easily manage their contacts, tasks and social media conversations to win business through social media. “When we started talking about the business, I realised how much of a geek I really was,” she says. “I love technology for what it can do, which makes me the business element of our business relationship. Mark is much more about loving technology and seeing how it progresses things along in the world.” In a nutshell, as Microsoft Outlook has become synonymous
“It quickly occurred to me how significant [social media] could be and how it was just another way to talk” with email and calendar management, CubeSocial is the professional one-stop-shop for social media. It allows enterprises to turn email contacts into social profiles, meaning businesses can see, in one simple view, which social media sites their contacts are using. This enables companies to approach their customers through the channels they are using, as well as posting updates to multiple social media accounts in a single click. CubeSocial also offers a hype-free social media consulting service to get you started with social media; from complete outsourcing of social media activity through to training, strategic planning and support. For some, the social-media sector is still rather intimidating and it’s easy to assume social-media entrepreneurs like Cheung must have had extensive pre-existing knowledge to make such an impact in the social space. But with refreshing frankness, Cheung admits that when she left Morgan Stanley she was a complete social-media novice; she had less than a dozen connections on LinkedIn and had never once opened a Facebook or Twitter account. All of her experience in the sector is very much self-taught – for a long time she simply watched how it was done, a process she calls ‘lurking and learning’, before creating her own profiles. It was, in fact, Jonathon Ross who was part of her business education in the start-up world. “He was one of the celebrities I followed,” Cheung explains. “It quickly occurred to me how significant [social media] could be and how it was just another way to talk.” A useful insight came from watching the way Ross used social interaction to drive word-of-mouth around his shows. He would tweet about who he’d be interviewing on the show the day before it was filmed, giving his followers product teasers, creating potential advocacy for that person and
www.elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk March 2013
(L)One to watch Cube Social.indd 2
01/03/2013 17:54