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

Even though it’s a short work week for most it doesn’t mean there is a shortage of top material for this weeks social media top 5. Here’s the best content we have discovered during the week while monitoring social media.

Our top pick is a hilarious video from The Onion explaining the findings of the lost civilization of Friendster by an internet archealogist. Next we have another video, this on the hot topic of augmented reality. It’s an iPhone within an iPhone…you better be sitting down for that one.

The third is a story on how the USGS is monitoring Twitter to measure how powerful earthquakes are by people’s reaction on Twitter. Next we have an interesting graphic that breaks down the top social media applications by Geography. Lots of Facebook green with some other interesting surprises.

Finally, we leave you with an awesome video created by DC Shoes. It’s a bit over the top with product placements but it is artistically stimulating and we love to see our customers doing cool things. I guess it ties in with the old saying that goes something like: “Advertising is good when it stops interrupting what you’re watching and becomes what you want to watch.”

Thanks for coming by, have a great holiday season from all of us at Filtrbox.

The remains of Friendster discovered
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/internet_archaeologists_find

Iphone in an Iphone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4IjeO7g6kA

Earthquakes
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091215/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_techbit_earthquakes_twitter

Social Media World Map - Top Social Media applications by geography
http://www.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/worldmap.png

Artistic DC shoes video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWSxhEU8KUI&feature=popular

80 year old uses a fax machine to tweet -
http://www.newser.com/story/76508/80-year-old-granny-twitters-by-fax.html?utm_source=syn&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tec.

Homeless guy “Mustard” covers Radiohead’s “Creep”…rather nicely.
http://www.bannedinhollywood.com/homeless-guy-mustard-sings-radioheads-creep/

Iranian Cyber Attack
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/12/20091218132325311321.html

YouTube video of the Universe shared by the American Museum of Natural History
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

Adrian Peterson and Sports Illustrated social media by conducting an interview through Digg Dialog
http://digg.com/dialogg/Adrian_Peterson_1

Facebook in real life?
http://www.bitrebels.com/social/facebook-in-real-life/

YouTube microwave
http://itvt.com/story/6214/microwave-oven-plays-youtube-videos-while-heating-food

Minneapolis using social media to share storm warnings
http://www.examiner.com/x-5611-Minneapolis-Tech-Culture-Examiner~y2009m12d10-City-of-Minneapolis-utilizes-social-media-to-announce-snow-emergencies

Google Earth technology to show deforestation
http://earth2tech.com/2009/12/10/copenhagen-google-launches-forest-monitoring-tool/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Possible UFO?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hrWjkn_DHs

As part of listening to the real time web we often stumble upon some entertaining tidbits. We found some interesting nuggets over this past week that range from a primate’s photos on her Facebook fan page to a well-known actor recycling a fund-raising idea. In case you missed these, here’s our top 5 most interesting social media stories of the week:

Nonga, an Orangutang’s Facebook Fan Page. She has a raisin-dispenser that dubs as a camera that uploads her photos directly to her Fan Page.

Fiesta Movement agents and their Twitter friends gathered at the Palladium in West Hollywood Tuesday night and set a new Guinness World Record for the “most attendees at a tweetup” Coverage here.

Sean Kingston: “Follow Me (Twitter Song)”. Sing Kingston tries to gain Twitter followers through song…it’s actually pretty good. Audio here.

Ben Stiller attempts to raise funds for schools in Haiti with StillerStrong. Not sure if he’s serious, but our headbands are en route to the Filtrbox office!

Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal could shake the up social media in a big way in terms of the way we watch “television” programs. Here’s the Hulu video clip of Conan O’brien’s humerous reaction to the purchase.

For the month of November, the Filtrbox team is participating in “Movember” also known as “No Shave November.” We are growing out our facial hair for the entire month of November to show our support for those with prostate cancer and raise money for a good cause. Instead of shaving that out-of-control beard or trimming up that dapper mustache, join us by putting the money you would have spent on razors and shaving cream and donate it to help those with prostate cancer.

What is Movember?
“Movember” originated in Adelaide, Australia by a group of men who were looking for a new way to raise money for men’s health issues, such as prostate cancer and depression. Movemeber has become a worldwide phenomenon, raising moola for men’s health issues.

The ‘Stachers
During our last round Brad Jordan was the triumphant mustache champion who outgrew the competition.

This year, the Filtrbox mustravaganza has some fresh competitors. The newcomers are Mike Fraietta, who joined Filtrbox last spring, as well as Dan Bergeron and Jared Schaffer, both joining Filtrbox in September. They are competing against Patrick Cameron, Ari Newman, and Ryan Tyer for one of two championships - the most money raised and the best ’stache. Reigning champ Brad gave the field a two week head start as he tended to the newest member of his family. He is back in the mix and may have already surpassed a few of the competitors.

Check out the competitors dailybooth pages to get the latest updates:
Ari, Brad, Ryan, Dan, Jared, Mike and Patrick.

If you are so inclined you can get in on the fun by joining our team or by donating to the cause here.

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!

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!