Greetings,

I wanted to provide a quick update on some exciting news. We are happy to announce that Filtrbox Inc. has been acquired by Jive Software. This exciting for us and the market as a whole because the two companies share a similar perspective on the value social software can provide to the entire enterprise.

The combined company will now tackle a much bigger opportunity in the marketplace as we will provide the only integrated social business software offering that both discovers conversations and provides the community space to enhance and facilitate the conversation.

Look for more on the specifics on the integration and the combined offering soon. In the meantime thanks for all of the the support and rest assured that we aren’t going anywhere and will only continue to improve our the service you’ve come to know and love.

Best Regards,
Ari

Exciting news, Filtrbox just keeps getting better! We’ve improved the service by adding several important content sources, better article classification, source metrics on relevant articles and a new summary view that helps you spot trends more quickly.

Filtrbox G2 now monitors public Facebook Groups/Fan Pages, over a million forums (threaded conversation pages), YouTube, Flickr and more. This expanded source coverage will ensure you never miss a conversation regardless of where it starts. All of the relevant conversations are visible in your dashboard providing a single consolidated view for monitoring, alerting and engagement.

The system now classifies mentions into 7 content types to make it easy to see where the conversations are happening and search just the sources that are important to you. We have also added domain traffic data for relevant articles to help you gauge the distribution of each post.

The 7 content types are:

* News - mainstream news and editorial outlets.
* Blogs - weblogs, blogs, the blogosphere, etc. Filtrbox monitors over 25 million of them.
* Social - sometimes known as microblogs. This includes Facebook public data, Twitter, and FriendFeed.
* Forums - online groups and forums. These are sites that provide threaded discussion groups and are extremely popular with online communities and organized groups. We now monitor over a million of them!
* Comments - All mentions found in blog comments are put into this category, and tend to have COMMENT in the title to clearly identify them.
* Video - Filtrbox now monitors YouTube, and classifies mentions and comments that match Filtrs from known online video sites.
* Images - Flickr and other popular online image sites.

Here is a brief video overview of the new dashboard:

 

A quick update from Las Vegas - We are at BlogWorldExpo this week joining in the fun. Yesterday, Filtrbox was the title sponsor of a great inagural Social Media for Executives session. Some great discussions and tons of advice were live-blogged by @agarahn. Check out the #execsocmed hashtag to check it out.

Shhhh. Tomorrow we are giving away 100 Filtrbox t-shirts in 10 minutes at Blogworld. 10:30 am, right after the morning keynote, right in front of the bookstore. Tell your BWE friends! The shirts are great.

October threatens to be a seriously busy month for Filtrbox, and that’s a good thing! This week alone, Ari pulls double duty on Thursday October 8th, presenting another chapter in our webinar series and presenting on a panel at CSIA’s DEMOgala.

Our webinar, “Social Media: Energizing Your Brand on Wikipedia,” gives participants an opportunity to learn more about how Wikipedia works, and how companies can leverage it with their social media programs. We are very lucky to have Gutenberg Communications’ David King co-hosting with us. He and Ari will also be presenting the following webinar on October 22nd, “B2B Social Media: Strategies that Pack a Punch.” Our webinars are free and open to the public so please feel free to share them with any interested parties.

Colorado’s CSIA puts on its annual DEMOgala at the Convention Center this week, always a great event, and this year promises to no different. Ari is on a panel along with eCairn’s CEO, Dominique Lahaix, Red Door Interactive’s president, Reid Carr, and NewsGator’s general manager of Media and Data Services, Walked Fenton. “How Do you Value Customer Engagement or Build a Social ROI” is moderated by Perficient’s managing director of Global Offshore Services, Kevin Sheen. The panel will take a closer look at how companies interpret social media, what tools they use, best practices, and how to measure ROI.

BlogWorld takes place in Las Vegas mid-month, and the day before kickoff Dave Taylor and Doyle Albee present the Executive Social Media Briefing – with Filtrbox as title sponsor! It’s a one day conference aimed at truly helping executives understand the impact social media can have, internally and externally, as well as discussing best practices. Ari will be presenting on a panel with EMBARQ’s general manager for Customer Operations, Linda O’Neil, and Liz Ryan, a corporate consultant on workplace issues and author of Happy About Online Networking: The Virtual-ly Simple Way to Build Professional Relationships.

We hope you will join us for one of these great events! In the meantime, we are putting the finishing touches on a new release that will add support for several key content sources you have been asking for!

We have some exciting news to share! Filtrbox and E SOURCE are working together to provide North American utilities with strategic social media guidance, supported by a robust monitoring, analysis and engagement platform. Utilities, like many other industries, are starting to embrace social media as a way to effectively communicate with their customers, via tools such as Twitter, YouTube, and corporate blogs.

Working with E SOURCE on this project has been great. We are glad to see the Utilities starting to better leverage social media. We think proactive social media listening and engagement will greatly benefit the companies that fully embrace it, especially in times of service problems or ongoing issues. E SOURCE is also leveraging our TwitterRank technology to assess who the most influential Utilities are on Twitter.

“Although social media is a relatively new space, utilities are learning that they can effectively leverage these evolving channels to better serve their customers, manage their brands, and increase satisfaction levels,” said Matthew Burks of E SOURCE. “An integrated social media strategy has strong potential benefits; however, even the first step of listening can provide invaluable insight into public opinion and critical brand and operational concerns. By teaming with Filtrbox, we give our utility clients the ability to monitor, analyze and, if appropriate, engage in relevant real-time online conversations.”

More about E SOURCE: They have been providing unbiased, objective energy business intelligence to over 300 utilities and large energy users for more than 20 years. Our research analysts and consultants are among the best minds in the business, delivering significant and timely research that equips our customers with the right information at the right time to make better, faster decisions. We predict and address trends, technologies, and problems related to energy efficiency, utility customer satisfaction, program design, marketing, customer management, and sustainability.

Link to press release on PitchEngine: Filtrbox and E SOURCE Join Forces to Bring Social Media Marketing Strategies to the Utility Industry

When everyone’s a twitter about social media, how do companies adjust to the changing role of marketing in an era of social media vs. traditional marketing, interactive vs. traditional media, and real time consumer feedback? Does your company need to have a presence on Facebook? Should you be hiring someone to Twitter instead of using direct mail – or should you use both? Although some companies have embraced social media marketing very successfully many are still wondering where to even start, and how to integrate into existing programs.

Join us and Stage Two Consulting on September 18th at 1 PM ET/ 10 AM PT for a complimentary webinar— as we discuss how social media marketing and traditional marketing integrate, how your company can leverage social media, along with best practices, how to listen, monitor, engage and interact, with highlights of specific case studies.
During our 60 minute seminar you will learn how to build a basic framework for social media activities within your organization, as well as:

• The evolution of marketing
• Traditional marketing vs. Social media marketing
• Looking ahead - blending social and traditional marketing
• How do we get there?
• Listening, monitoring, engaging
• Everyone doesn’t need a Facebook page
• Opt in via Twitter: is Twitter the new Direct Mail?
• Micro Blogs
• Best practices
• Case Studies
• Q&A

Sign up!

We just posted new jobs in sales and development on a number of job boards. Our business is growing and we are looking for some motivated, talented people to help us make it happen. Rather than repost everything already on our jobs page, just click here and check it out. If you know someone looking for a new gig and wants to work at a growing start-up, please feel free to forward along.

Does having a Facebook “ Fan Page” make your company social media savvy? Are you getting the most out of your social media activities? How can you leverage social media to improve your brand awareness and get better PR results? In any campaign it’s important to get tangible results.  Social media enables you to engage directly  while building your brand and a sphere of influencers.  Even more significantly, it allows your company to develop a relationship of trust through a one-on-one conversation with your audience – whether they are consumers, partners, or future prospects.

Join us and Room214  on August 13th at 1 PM eastern for a complimentary webinar— Get the basics on social media interaction and know best practices for engagement in order to truly understand how to value the success of such a program for your company.  During our 60 minute seminar you will learn how to build a basic framework for social media activities within your organization, as well as :

·         Understanding the playing field
·         Rules of engagement
·         Four levels of Social Media Participation
·         Best Practices - Engagement
·         Best Practices - Tools
·         Next Steps:  where to go from here

REGISTER NOW – and get a free 14 trial of the Filtrbox G2 social media listening platform and one lucky active participant will win a free social media audit from Room214 valued at $15,000.

Ari from Filtrbox will be joining Vignette, New Belgium Brewing and Brickfish at an event put on by Red Door Interactive in Denver on Tuesday, July 14th. Should be a good discussion with lots of useful advice on how to implement a successful social media strategy.

From the site…

An effective social media strategy requires research, planning, implementation, tracking and reporting on results. Learn how to strategically implement your social media efforts for maximum return with a panel of Social Media experts (the real kind, we promise) from leading internet presence management firm Red Door Interactive along with industry experts from New Belgium Brewery, Vignette, Filtrbox and the social media solution, Brickfish. In this session you’ll gain valuable insights and actionable best practices that you can take back and immediately apply to your social media initiatives

Sign up here to join us!

We are excited to share some good news for Filtrbox customers. Today we are announcing a partnership with NewsGator Data Services to further expand our content coverage and giving you yet another reason to sign up with Filtrbox and engage in the conversation!

NewsGator has an impressive 4.9 million feeds indexed, and adds 9 million articles a day from their sources. That’s a lot of content! We have completed an integration that allows our service to monitor the NewsGator repository for new mentions related to your Filtrs. This means that you only get the new, relevant articles that match your Filtrs without having to sift through tons of feeds or irrelevant articles.

Last week we announced that Backtype comments had been added to the system, and now with the addition of NewsGator our coverage has never been better. If you are already a Filtrbox customer you don’t have to do a thing, NewsGator content is already live and will be categorized by Filtrbox as Blog, Mainstream or Social just like all of our other articles.

The full press release is on NewsGator’s site here.

We’ve got more product news coming soon, so watch this space or follow us on Twitter for updates.