Jive, a leader in “social business software” for enterprise collaboration and community platforms, has added social media expertise to its repertoire. Through social media monitoring tools from Radian6, the new Jive Market Engagement lets companies track and respond to the social Web in real time.
Radian6 is the kind of software that we’ve called the future of social media monitoring for businesses. By integrating it into software known for collaboration under the control of the enterprise, Jive is wasting no time in trying to connect its customers with people outside company-run communities.
A few of Jive’s competitors in the community platform space, such as Lithium, have added the ability to integrate social networks like Facebook and Twitter into their corporate sites. But Jive clearly prefers to use software that already shows prowess in a feature set, rather than develop something from scratch.
Just like the integration of SAP’s BusinessObjects for analytics, Jive chose to take advantage of competence Radian6 has in social media. By including its technology Jive can use RSS feeds, Google alerts, and email between employees to track blogs, forums, photo and video sharing sites, as well as popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
In the past Jive has stressed creating a channel of communication between customers in a community and employees in an intranet. Now they’re adding a connection to parts of the Web outside the corporate control, and we think that’s a big step for enterprise software platforms.
There are plenty of companies who’ve recognized the importance of Twitter and Facebook for business. But Jive is offering the first complete line of communication from social networks to customer communities and collaborative software behind the firewall.
