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Announcing our New Product Release!

Jul 2012/in /by

I love release days. Not only is there the excitement of announcing great, new product features, but there’s a real thrill each time I see yet another amazing, customer-focused accomplishment for FirstRain. However, release days are exciting for our customers too, since it’s a reassurance that we are working hard for you and your business needs.

When I started at FirstRain (almost one year ago!), we had just announced the integration of our mobile platform for iPhone and Android devices. Since then I’ve seen the introduction of several new products, such as: the development of the iPad app, the introduction of the FirstRain ECI system, and more recently, the FirstTweets and visualization analytics integration. We’ve really come a long way in just under a year!

Today, we at FirstRain have put out our July 2012 Product Release, and with it we are adding some great new updates and additions to many of the great new features we’ve developed in the past year. This month’s release is all personalization. We’ve updated our iPad app, improving the in-app monitor experience, taking an already great app and making it even more powerful and useful. So if you’re a FirstRain user who hasn’t yet downloaded FirstRain for iPad, now’s a great time to do so!

We’ve also updated our iPhone and Android apps and added in some nice, new features throughout the product to better personalize and share your customer intelligence experience. This release focuses on taking what we already have that works well and making it even more personal.

For all of you who are FirstRain customers, I encourage you to check out these new updates and, as always, please let us know what you think!

FirstTweets 2012

Delivering Unique Business-Relevant Tweets: Facebook IPO

May 2012/in , , , /by

Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.

Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.

The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.

On the day before Facebook’s IPO:

At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:

FirstTweets

FirstRain’s FirstTweets Weren’t Built for Me (But I Benefit)

Apr 2012/in /by

Note: This post was originally posted on my personal blog “Chitchating about Information Delivery” on April 18th, 2012.

This week’s FirstRain’s announcement of FirstTweets a solution for B2B users delivering “business-quality Twitter intelligence on thousands of global companies, industries and topics relevant to the specific business lines of your customers, industry and competitors”- was an exciting one for our team and our customers.

I have been on a couple of client calls where we previewed this new content stream and across the board the enthusiasm and spark of ideas around FirstTweets from them has been very inspiring. These are companies of all sizes across various industries- some that have been extremely active supporters of using Social Media as part of their strategies (e.g. Customer Care centers, tech support, brand monitoring etc) and others that are just starting out.

For example, some of these companies have tried to use their existing social media monitoring and measuring tools to ‘push’ relevant business content to their sales team, but none have been able to crack the code using their existing systems that are great for monitoring their own brands and customers using keywords- but can not deliver precise business focused content on thousands of companies and industries that their salesforce covers or their market intelligence teams needs to keep track of competitors and new business trends. Some have tried other ‘sales intelligence’ solutions that push social media buzz into their CRM systems- all based on keywords with low hit business relevancy results- turning off most users.

Now i have been an active user of Twitter for a bit over 5 years, just when the little twitter bird began chirping. i use Twitter outbound and to listen quite a bit. I would estimate that i have spent hundreds of hours, curating content, selecting people to follow (and unfollow!) , creating lists, monitoring client issues, company employees and general news. i am one of those 9% of digital news consumers that sees the news Break on Twitter.

I use Twitter effectively and teach others how to at any chance i get- but hundreds of hours of my time has been invested, and will continue to be since Twitter is not a set it and leave it information flow.

Is that the level of time investment that most companies want for their employees that are not responsible for monitoring and measuring social media??? Do companies want staff especially Sales who can benefit greatly from business intelligence found in Twitter- spending the same amount of time i have over the years??

I would venture to say no.

Now, i think that EVERY employee should consider using Twitter to engage with their peers in their industry, their customers and of course their friends and family- but i don’t think the processes that i have developed over the years is sustainable for most sales and marketing people- especially as your markets become more competitive and the budget dollars to spend on the solutions you sell decrease.

And that is where i see the biggest promise for FirstTweets- delivering intelligence to better understand your customers’ end-markets, strengthen relationships and improve overall sales strategy.

The customers i have talked to agree.

Note: Today April 18th is the official launch to existing FirstRain customers, i have been using FirstTweets in our Sandbox environment for about two weeks- and have found many gems that i would never have found using the various tools i use in my Twitter day to day use- so it wasn’t built for “me”- but i sure will benefit from it!

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