Jive buys Filtrbox to boost social media monitoring

The Filtrbox technology will be integrated into Jive's Market Engagement application

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To enhance its suite of enterprise collaboration products, Jive has bought Filtrbox, whose software helps companies track social media content across the Web in real time.

Jive plans to tightly fuse the Filtrbox software with its Jive Market Engagement application by the second quarter of this year. Jive Market Engagement can be used on its own or in conjunction with the broader Jive SBS enterprise collaboration suite.

Jive also intends to keep Filtrbox as a stand-alone product, enhancing and supporting it for its current and future customers, company officials said.

According to Filtrbox's Web site, the company's software scans millions of news Web sites, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and other public social media sources, collecting content it has been instructed to flag by its users, such as mentions of their own brands and competing products.

With millions of consumers and organizations posting comments about every conceivable topic on blogs, social networks such as Twitter and sites in general, it has become a challenge for companies to track mentions of themselves, their competitors and relevant topics on the Web.

Products such as Filtrbox and Jive Market Engagement are designed to automate and simplify the monitoring, aggregation, synthesis and analysis of social media content, so companies can make related marketing, public relations, support and sales decisions in an informed manner.

Jive liked Filtrbox's software for several reasons, including what it considers an outstanding user interface, a strong set of collaboration features and granular capabilities to adjust its content monitoring and analysis parameters. In addition, it's a Web-hosted application, like Jive Market Engagement, officials said.

Filtrbox, based in Boulder, Colorado, and founded in 2007, has 11 employees and its customers include Cigna, Morningstar and Kohler. Financial details of the acquisition weren't disclosed.