Jive Market Engagement Filters Out White Noise in Social Media

Jive Software Sept. 15 moved to help business users drill down into the most relevant social media conversations with Jive Market Engagement, which lets marketers get a handle on what users are saying about their brands online.

Jive Market Engagement bundles Jive's SAAS Social Business Software platform with real-time social media monitoring tools from Radian6, which provides analysis widgets and reporting tools to help users track and measure engagement and determine which conversations are having an impact online. Jive declined to provide financial details for what is ostensibly an original equipment manufacturing agreement.

This solution aims to more quickly help marketers find out what the public is saying about their companies' products and services in public forums such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and other online sources where millions of users congregate. The software lets users specify certain keywords for the monitoring tools to look for across the social Web.

Say a marketer for a leading computer maker is using Jive Market Engagement. He can tune the monitoring tools in the application to look for keywords such as "netbook," "PC" and "laptop," as well as specific models and brands. The monitoring tool then alerts the marketer to a new netbook being tweeted about on Twitter that poses a competitive threat.

Marketers can then leverage the Jive Social Business Software platform to invite up to 50 other colleagues into a secure online workspace called the "Market Space" to discuss an answer to the threat.

In this virtual war room, users can loop in observations from Twitter tweets, blogs or anything gleaned from the Radian6 automated monitoring tools. These observations can then be pooled into Jive "Viewpoints," or market summary reports that can be shared within an organization

"It not only allows marketers and companies to identify the big conversation going on the in the social Web—looking at blog posts, videos, photos, Twitter and FriendFeed, and identifying the conversation—but also collaborating on the conversation to help teams move faster," Jive CMO Ben Kiker told eWEEK.

Kiker said there is a market opportunity for this solution because most companies currently rely on alerts, people and e-mail to stay on top of conversations. These practices are serviceable for helping marketers keep a finger on the pulse of social media, but they won't provide additional insight about who is talking about what and to what extent in a consolidated dashboard.

That's what Jive Market Engagement offers, and it could give Jive a new leg up on some long-standing rivals, including Socialtext, MindTouch, Google Apps, IBM Lotus and other upstarts, such as WizeHive.

Kiker said this solutions costs $25,000 for an annual subscription.

Jive isn't the only collaboration vendor with news today. Spigit became the latest software maker to piggyback on Microsoft SharePoint with Spigit for SharePoint. As one might imagine, the solution integrates Spigit's idea-sharing application with the SharePoint collaboration program.

"No doubt many great ideas are generated on SharePoint team sites, but it can be hard for decision makers to learn about them, especially when there are multiple sites within a single organization," said Spigit CEO Paul Pluschkell in a statement. He said Spigit for SharePoint provides a "one-stop snapshot" for idea contribution and management.

Spigit for SharePoint can be set up as a tab within SharePoint for access across an entire enterprise, or as a Spigit button embedded in specific team Websites.