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:

 

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.

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!

Format is simple - we’ll provide a demo/overview to kick off the event and then give everyone the day to hack/play, ask questions, etc. We’ll provide lunch and then wrap up with a beer-fueled demo session at the end of the day. The crowd favorite app/hack wins an iPod Touch!

More info on the EventBrite page here. Hope you can join us!

Location: Downtown Boulder, CO, this Friday October 9th

Working with E SOURCE on this project has been great. We are glad to see the Utilities starting to better leverage social media. We think proactive social media listening and engagement will greatly benefit the companies that fully embrace it, especially in times of service problems or ongoing issues. E SOURCE is also leveraging our TwitterRank technology to assess who the most influential Utilities are on Twitter.

“Although social media is a relatively new space, utilities are learning that they can effectively leverage these evolving channels to better serve their customers, manage their brands, and increase satisfaction levels,” said Matthew Burks of E SOURCE. “An integrated social media strategy has strong potential benefits; however, even the first step of listening can provide invaluable insight into public opinion and critical brand and operational concerns. By teaming with Filtrbox, we give our utility clients the ability to monitor, analyze and, if appropriate, engage in relevant real-time online conversations.”

More about E SOURCE: They have been providing unbiased, objective energy business intelligence to over 300 utilities and large energy users for more than 20 years. Our research analysts and consultants are among the best minds in the business, delivering significant and timely research that equips our customers with the right information at the right time to make better, faster decisions. We predict and address trends, technologies, and problems related to energy efficiency, utility customer satisfaction, program design, marketing, customer management, and sustainability.

Link to press release on PitchEngine: Filtrbox and E SOURCE Join Forces to Bring Social Media Marketing Strategies to the Utility Industry

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.

Join us and Stage Two Consulting on September 18th at 1 PM ET/ 10 AM PT for a complimentary webinar— as we discuss how social media marketing and traditional marketing integrate, how your company can leverage social media, along with best practices, how to listen, monitor, engage and interact, with highlights of specific case studies.
During our 60 minute seminar you will learn how to build a basic framework for social media activities within your organization, as well as:

• The evolution of marketing
• Traditional marketing vs. Social media marketing
• Looking ahead - blending social and traditional marketing
• How do we get there?
• Listening, monitoring, engaging
• Everyone doesn’t need a Facebook page
• Opt in via Twitter: is Twitter the new Direct Mail?
• Micro Blogs
• Best practices
• Case Studies
• Q&A

Sign up!

There are some useful points in the GigaOm article. Namely that blog subscribers are more valuable in general because of the intent and level of effort required to subscribe and the conscious decision it represents. Subscribing to blogs is pretty easy for most, but it does indeed take more thought than the single-click “follow” event that happens millions of times a day on Twitter.

Of particular relevance to us at Filtrbox was a point made about “deficient continuity”. Here’s the issue;
If you are not watching your twitter stream every second of the day, or spending quality time every day scanning your profile page to see what your followers said earlier in the day, you are missing the conversation and missing the posts/links/stories/opinions you care about. You miss everything you don’t watch. Filtrbox solves this problem because the monitoring is persistent, but that’s another post…

This may be part of the problem - if you don’t see the tweet, how can you possibly engage and respond? With a blog post, it comes to you when you are on the task of reading or consuming news. Its either in your inbox, in an RSS reader, or you have hit a portal page with your feeds on them. Does this make you more likely to respond?

Taking a look at our own blog, our subscribers were growing at a much slower rate than Twitter followers. I also have noticed that we don’t get as many comments or responses to blog posts. (Granted - we’ve not done a great job of updating this blog with good, fresh content) The questions I started pondering were:

• Has the conversation totally moved to Twitter?
• Has information overload finally saturated our readers?
• Is the audience/community/group of readers of a different profile?
• Do we have to work harder to convince people to subscribe to the blog? Is it more work to consume the content?

Something else I’ve noticed is that just like more traditional news stories, time of day and day of week matter on Twitter. In fact, I’d suspect the “deficient continuity” problem is quite a bit worse, and the attention/responses you’ll get evenings, weekends, etc is vastly different than, say, Tuesday morning.

What do you think? Are your Twitter followers more valuable than your blog subscribers?

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.