USA Today’s article about social media and Customer Service touches on some key topics and realities for consumer brand companies embracing Twitter, etc. In the article they indicate that over 50% of the Fortune 100 is using Twitter for customer service (CS) today. Exciting news, right?

Yes…but (there’s always a but), it often comes with an avalanche of traffic and noise. For some brands, its probably like building out a new call center, lighting up 50 phones and only hiring 2 new people to staff them. There is a risk of INCREASED customer frustration in some cases. Twitter is just a new communication channel for customers and companies to converse. Email forever changed the world of phone-based support. Web tickets and Wikis dramatically changed email-based support, and Live chat blew them both away. Twitter is now doing the same. There is still a lot of learning to be done but some companies are managing it well and leading the charge.

With new channels and new technology come innovations and adaptations. Twitter’s meta-data allows customer service to understand more about who they are talking to than ever before. Your influence and relevancy can be immediately assessed, and can be used (in both directions!) by the company to triage who to respond to first. As much as we’d like to think every cry for help should be treated equally, it will be interesting to see how social media metrics and influence play a role in the service pecking order. Will influence assessment be taught as part of the CS team’s social media training? Will they all start using our TwitterRank to figure out who to respond to?

If @scobleizer starts (sorry Robert, you are always a great example) complaining about a product on Twitter, will the Twitter-savvy CS team be on him in seconds? You bet. If I complain, will they even care? Maybe…if I file an FCC complaint.

In customer service situations, we, as consumers hope for a democratized experience. It wil be interesting to see how social media policy shakes out between departments. In marketing, its all about finding influencers. In customer service, will this be ignored, or will SOP be to assess influence as the triage mechanism for complaints and cries for help?

Do you use Twitter and other social media outlets for customer service? Do you evaluate influence as part of the process? If so we’d love to hear your thoughts!

Up to this point, Filtrbox has been blocking content coming from Blogspot.com due to the significant percentage of spam/splog content found on that domain. Our research found that the noise from spam blogs on Blogspot overwhelmed the quality blogs by a significant margin. We’ve enhanced our domain blocking filters so you can now block individual sub-domains (or the entire domain!), which allows us to enable access to Blogspot, while giving you the control to block noisy or spammy blogs. As of today, access to all Blogspot.com content will be automatically enabled for all Filtrbox accounts.

How to manage blogspot.com or sub-domains:

1. Log into your Filtrbox dashboard
2. Navigate to the Account tab
3. Click on the “Blocked Domains” section
4. Click on the “Add Domain” button and enter “blogspot.com” on the new line OR
5. Click on “block domain” in the article viewer on a specific article. This will block that domain/sub-domain.

Let us know if you have any questions or need assistance getting your blacklist fine-tuned.

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.

Andrew Hyde (@andrewhyde) of Startup Weekend and Techstars shows how to customize Filtrs to monitor individual Twitter accounts for specific topics. Check out the video.

Note: A Filtrbox G2 account is required for this hack. If you have a Basic account and want more power and more control, drop us a line and try G2 for 14 days for free!

Filtrbox now supports real-time alerts for all of our content sources. This means you can set up alerts for Twitter (as well as the millions of other sources we monitor). The system will send you an email alert as soon as a new mention is found. There are a ton of useful applications for this feature, but here are a few essentials.

• Company monitor - set up an alert for any mentions of your company on Twitter. Even when you are not being spoken to with an @reply, you still see the mention.
• Vanity Search - set up two Filtrs for this one, one for your name (use quotes!) and one for your twitterID. The problem with desktop tools or Twitter search is that they are only working for you when you are running them and interacting with them. With Filtrbox it’s set it and forget it. What I love about this is that even when I’m running around to meetings, the alerts are in my inbox and I don’t have to waste time in multiple apps looking for the mentions.
• Lead Generation - search for a phrase or a hashtag that relates to your business. Monitor the conversations in real-time and tweet back when folks are looking for solutions.

Please note that a Filtrbox G2 (paid subscription) is required to access this feature. If you have a Free account and want to upgrade, please get in touch with us.

Instructions

1. Log into your G2 account
2. Create a new Filtr, or use an existing one
3. Enter your search term in the “find articles about” box. If its a new Filtr hit save!
4. Check the “enable realtime alerts” box

5. Tune the Filtr’s sources and minimum rank. If you just want alerts for Twitter, uncheck the Mainstream and Blog options. You can also uncheck the “include in daily briefing” if you don’t want the results coming each morning in addition to the real-time alerts. Save the settings.

Click on the thumbnail to see our own company monitor:

If you have any questions on the setup let us know by leaving a comment or question here.

We are pleased to announce a new webinar series - “Getting the most out of Filtrbox G2″. Join us for our first webinar this Thursday at 11:00 AM MDT. Patrick Cameron of Filtrbox will run you through best practices, tips and tricks for fine-tuning your account and dialing in your Filtrs for maximum performance. It doesn’t matter if you already have an account, or are just curious to see Filtrbox in action we guarantee you’ll learn something new!

Follow this link to register. http://tinyurl.com/c2oqgp Space is limited so sign up soon! We’ll be posting a full Webinar calendar shortly as well.

We often get asked how Filtrbox is different from traditional RSS readers and aggregators. Here is a quick review of the major differences:

Content Discovery

When using traditional RSS aggregators, the user supplies the list of RSS feeds. This means that the domain of information gathered by a traditional RSS reader/aggregator is limited to the RSS feeds (content sources) that are known to the user. However, given today’s information environment there are thousands of new content sources are being created on a daily basis. Anyone can potentially become a publisher, and it is unrealistic to put the burden on the user to keep up with the thousands of new content sources that are sprouting up each day. Filtrbox takes this burden off of the user’s shoulders and discovers the new content sources automatically. Filtrbox’s search domain covers broad content sources INCLUDING new content sources a user is not aware of.

Additionally, Filtrbox has a provision for the users to add their own RSS feeds of interest to be searched.

Publisher centric vs. content centric

Traditional RSS readers/aggregators present to the user all the content that is published by a specific publisher regardless of whether the user is interested in the content or not. Thus, the traditional RSS readers/aggregators implement a publisher centric consumption model. On the other hand, Filtrbox implements a content centric model. Rather than deliver to the user all the content published by a specific publisher, whether its relevant or not, Filtrbox allows the user to filter for the content that they are interested in from ANY publisher by providing contextual filtrs. The content centric model implemented by Filtrbox greatly reduces information overload because each piece of content is examined and filtered for contextual relevance before it is delivered to the user.

No filtering vs. contextual relevance filtering

As indicated above, most traditional RSS aggregators do not filter the content. All content published by a limited list of publishers is delivered to the user regardless of whether it is relevant or not. Filtrbox provides the user with the ability to better tune the filtering system for contextual relevence.

Relevance Ranking

Traditional RSS readers/aggregators do little to solve the problem of information overload. Filtrbox users have the ability to say “I know there is a lot of information out there, just show me the important stuff”. Filtrbox is able to show “the important stuff” because it ranks articles based on their relevance and importance to the user using proprietary scoring algorithm called called FiltrRank™. Articles with a high FiltrRank™ score indicate articles of the highest importance.

Search feeds on steroids

Some search sites or RSS readers allow you to consume feeds for search results. Filtrbox provides custom feeds (known as FiltrFeeds) that can be added to any reader or aggregator. FiltrFeeds also leverage FiltrRank™ and automatically aggregate the results from the millions of sources Filtrbox covers. This means you get the benefit of contextual scoring, noise control, and automatic aggregation.

Beyond RSS

Unlike traditional RSS readers, aggregators, and content roll-up sites, Filtrbox consumes content delivery formats beyond RSS. Filtrbox is capable of consuming both standard and proprietary content delivery formats.

Not really a reader

Filtrbox is not trying to be a replacement RSS reader or feed aggregator. The service discovers content from millions of sources and delivers it to you via email, RSS or the rich web dashboard. There are some basic article viewing features that are shared with email clients and news readers like mark-as-read, delete article, flagging and feedback, but thats about where the similarities end.

One of the most exciting things about working at Filtrbox is hearing new ways people are using our persistent search technology to make them more productive in their daily lives.  We often hear of people using Filtrbox to track their brand or keep an eye on competitors and sales prospects but we also hear about people tracking medical issues or looking for new fitness workouts or gaming tips. In fact the list seems virtually endless!  Below are a few or our favorites that we’ve come across recently.  Feel free to use them for inspiration and by all means keep filtring and sharing your experiences with us. Drop us a line and let us know what YOU Filtr!
————————-
Filtrbox is the best application I have ever used to watch the trends. I do not use it for business purposes but am following the discussions around the net on three issues: Deleuze, as my favorite philosopher, and Khatami (the former President of Iran, sometimes I forward the findings to his advisors), and “dialogue among cultures and civilizations”.
I do not check my account at filtrbox.com often, as it is filtered by some ISPs here in Tehran; I check it for certain tweaking in the keywords when I find access. The daily email briefings are marvelous as they lead me to fresh information as well as new connections.
I use google analytics but Filtrbox is more powerful.
————————-
I work in the public relations department for HomeAway, Inc. the largest vacation
rental marketplace that currently has 11 sites in all. Given the number of
sites and the unique key words associated with each such as  HomeAway.com, VRBO.com
and VacationRentals.com - it is important that we have a tool to monitor everything said with each site.
With the ever-expanding media landscape – Filtrbox helps us
identify moves by competitors, comments by users and praise by
customers. Typically, I am fully aware of the news that comes from
traditional media (dailies, magazines and broadcast) — however, social
media is when it becomes hard to predict when and what gets said - this is why I use Filtrbox.
—————————
I have been using Filtrbox to find information on employers I was applying to, as well as for the less serious/more fun use of trying to find information on Blu-Ray releases of more obscure/art films I am a fan of.
————————-
I use Filtrbox to stay on top of news for work and for personal growth.
Mainly around the topics of Deliverability for email (Work), Forex
Trading (personal), Venture Capital News (both personal and work).  The
daily emails that I receive really help me scan through and grab the
information that I find interesting for the day.  Keep up the good work.
————————-
Great tool! One of those ideas that are obvious and implemented, but not well. I filter for just a few terms, mainly related to the python programming language.
The signal to noise ratio is quite good. I have found many posts that I would not have easily found, and many that I would not have thought of searching for. I have developed several business relationships from articles found from filtrbox.
Keep up the good work!
————————–
I use Filtrbox to track two websites I work on. I’ve found it more useful and reliable than Google alerts
which sometimes sends me alerts for links that are months old!
——————–
I’m a PR guy, so I’m trying to keep an eye on what the Internet is saying
about my clients. The difference with Filtrbox is Twitter conversations. Not
even Twitter’s own search features pull in as much as Filtrbox does. Also,
Filtrbox seems to pull info from places Google Alerts can’t find. I like it.

—————————

We are a start-up in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field.  Though a much hyped technology right now, being a part of the cloud computing bandwagon, it is still fairly new and often, the target of scathing put-downs that go with the praises.  We use Filtrbox to monitor our company brand through keywords.  With it, we can listen to the conversations surrounding it and if possible, be able to allay such fears to drive trial deployments and eventually, adoption and do away with the ‘hard sell’ as much as possible.
Like most start-ups, non-techies like me have to wear a bunch of hats and one hat requires that I do the part of social media for our company.  This involves listening, listening and listening as well as timely responses to issues raised about us and even for the industry in general.  With Filtrbox, you reduce the time to go through online researches and it’s like having another staff present taking care of such a big task without the accompanying cost. [Not that we're cheap, just saving resources.  Already asked for budget to get a Filtrbox paid account.  Hopefully, soon!]

In the past few weeks we’ve added two features to enhance our support of Twitter monitoring within Filtrbox.

1. Tweet This - From within the dashboard, you can now tweet any article in your account. Just mouse over an article and you’ll see the new “tweet this” link on the action bar. This is a super-easy way to share articles found in Filtrbox with the Twitter community. All you need is a twitter account, and as long as you are logged into Twitter in your browser it will work seamlessly.




2. Twitter links in your Daily Briefing - The ability to monitor conversations on Twitter in Filtrbox isn’t new, but the Daily Briefing emails have now been updated to show you who posted the tweet. Its also a live link so you can visit that person’s twitter page very easily. Here’s what it looks like in your daily briefing email.

Let us know what you think!

You asked, and we listened! Log into your dashboard and check out the new features we have just released. Many of these enhancements are the result of direct customer feedback, and we addressed a number of issues that have been nagging us too. If you haven’t logged into your dashboard in awhile, take a few minutes and refine your Filtrs or add a new one and give the new version a test-drive. Details on the enhancements follow;

• Improved Filtrs and live search
• Better charting
• Mark-as-Read support
• Delete article support
• Block source
• OPML file import
• Action bar

Improved Filtrs and live search
The way that Filtrbox runs its searches has been improved to provide more accurate and comprehensive results. You may notice some changes in the articles the system finds for your Filtrs. In almost all cases this should be an improvement, in the case of very general filtrs you may now want to refine them further to get more relevant results.

In order to provide better instant-feedback and a more consistent experience, Filtrbox now runs live searches for your Filtrs as you set them up and provides sample results from a broader range of sources. Click and drag include or exclude terms from the tag cloud or add additional terms yourself and click search to get realtime feedback reflected in new sample articles. Check out this quick screencast to see it in action.



Better Charting
This release introduces a new charting component that looks a bit different, performs better, and will offer more flexibility as we expand the display options. What’s new is the date box and calendar pop-up to control the date ranges, and the “show for the past days” box where you can just type in how many days of data you want. Much easier to use than the sliders that were there before.

Mark-as-Read
After you have clicked on an article in the Filtrbox dashboard, the title of the article goes from bold to regular text. You can mark an article as un-read also if needed.



Delete article
There are cases where you might want to remove an article from your account. Perhaps the article is not relevant to your Filtrs, or it’s a splog that slipped through our defense systems. If you are in PR or web marketing and you are using FiltrFeeds, you can also use this feature to cleanse an article out of a feed that is getting published or shared. Once articles are deleted, they are removed from your account and cannot be recovered. There is no “un-delete” - once its gone its gone!

Block source
Here’s another very handy feature that helps remove articles and content you simply don’t want to see going forward. Perhaps you consistently see articles from a domain you don’t care for, or is of little value to you. Just click “block source” and the domain gets added to your personal blacklist.



You can even modify or remove the blocked domains. Filtrbox looks at the FQDN, not just the domain. This means you can block “notagoodblog.wordpress.com” without blocking the entire domain. If you wanted to block all of wordpress.com, you can add this to the blocked domains list manually. You can also modify a blocked domain or remove previously blocked domains. This is done on the Account/Manage Content Sources tab.




OPML file import
Filtrbox already persistently searches millions of blogs, thousands of mainstream sources, and social networks such as Twitter and FriendFeed, but if you want to ensure the system monitors specific feeds you care about, you can add them to your account. Filtrbox now supports OPML file import to make it easy to add a large number of feeds at once. This can be found on the Account/Manage Content Sources tab also.



Action bar
We cleaned up the dashboard a bit by moving a number of functions to an “action bar” that appears as you mouse over each article. From this bar, you can provide feedback, share the article, delete, or block the article’s source.

In addition to these features there are a number of “under the hood” improvements you shouldn’t see, but from which you will benefit. We hope you like these enhancements, and are hoping to hear from you on what else you’d like to see to help you get even more value from Filtrbox! Just leave us a comment on the blog, or drop us a line at support [at] filtrbox.com.