Portland, OR - January 7, 2010 Jive, the Social Business Software (SBS) leader, today announced the acquisition of privately-held Filtrbox, a social media monitoring (SMM) innovator. Jive will integrate the Filtrbox real-time social media monitoring and engagement capabilities into the Jive SBS platform to help enterprises harness the power of the social web and change the way they make decisions, develop products, go to market, and engage with customers, prospects and brand influencers.
The Jive SBS Platform provides Social Business Software functionality that injects a corporate infrastructure with a social layer to connect people, content and activities inside and outside the enterprise. A key component to this vision is the ability to drive real value from the "real-time web," beyond simply "listening" to online social interaction.
Initially, Jive will integrate Filtrbox technology into the Jive Market Engagement solution, the first solution to combine SMM with the power of collaborative SBS to implement a unified social media engagement strategy. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
As Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other powerful online sources have become a greater force of influence on consumer and business purchasing decisions, the global economy is moving to a "conversation economy."
But today, most enterprises have only focused on the role the social web plays in brand disruptions. Even the most sophisticated use cases - where companies have used the social web to promote products and build the brand - fall short of truly engaging and driving the power of real-time conversations.
Because of their complexity and cost, SMM tools have been confined to a handful of power-users within an organization. Given the increasingly strategic role social web conversations are playing in product development, customer service and support, a broader set of users want and need easy, cost-effective access to social intelligence.
"Our acquisition of Filtrbox is another example of Jive's leadership in defining and delivering Social Business Software solutions that deliver real business impact," said Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software. "SBS has quickly become a 'must have' for organization looking to address the biggest challenges of today's global marketplace: unpredictable competitive pressures, capricious market conditions, and unparalleled customer word-of-mouth driving purchasing decisions."
After a thorough evaluation of SMM providers, Jive chose Filtrbox for several key reasons: Filtrbox is designed for a broad set of users with an intuitive user experience that allows for rapid adoption, which is in strong alignment with Jive's philosophy. Filtrbox includes powerful collaboration features that align with Jive SBS to socialize key observations and collaborate on appropriate responses. Filtrbox makes it easy to prioritize feeds and dial the "noise" up or down to manage information from the social web. It uses intelligence to adjust rankings based on how the user interacts with the data, and offers the ability to analyze the trends and influencers in an enterprise's market. Filtrbox has a scalable architecture that enables enterprises to process large volumes of social intelligence faster and at a lower cost. And its on-demand model matches Jive's strategy for expanding its cloud footprint in the future.
