A year ago today, Jive laid out some pretty big plans for leading the Social  Business Software space:

“Social  Business Software is the first new application category to appear in over a decade that delivers a real breakthrough in cost, productivity, and competitive  advantage. Jive is the first SBS company with a complete strategy for meeting the needs of Global 2000 companies and governments.”

We were confident in our vision for Jive and the market we were defining—but how did it play out? Our strategy had three key elements:

• Create the first purpose-built, enterprise-class, Social Business Software application suite: Jive SBS 3.0.  DONE
• Build an enterprise go-to-market model for selling, servicing, and  supporting the most demanding Global 2000 companies and governments.  DONE
• Create the Jive Industry—the largest collection of strategic technology, application, and services partners in the SBS market. AND  DONE!

We couldn’t have asked for better. A year ago, a lot of CXO’s were still skeptical about Social Business Software. They thought “social” meant employees weren't really working! Now they’ve seen the results. They understand the value that Jive SBS delivers: collaborating more effectively with employees, customers, and partners; accelerating sales cycle times and service delivery times; and increasing engagement with customer communities and the social Web.

Jive won them over because we’re solving big business problems, and our business has grown accordingly:

• We doubled in size in 2008, then grew another 85% in 2009.
• Major brands committed to and added to their Jive solutions including Booz Allen Hamilton, Bupa, EMC, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Kaiser Permanente, Life Technologies, Manheim, Musician's Friend, Qualcomm, SAP, Scheels Sports, Sling Media, Sprint, StrongMail, Swiss Re, and United Business Media Limited.
• We made our first strategic acquisition—Filtrbox—in January.
• We expanded our Portland HQ, and added offices in the SF Bay Area, Boulder CO, Germany, and the UK.
• We’ve added numerous systems integrators and interactive marketing partners to the Jive SBS ecosystem—exactly as we’d planned.

The market clearly thinks we’re onto something too. Last year, the competition we were leading consisted of a handful of pure play vendors. Now, big guns like Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Salesforce.com want a piece of  the SBS action—and more are coming. They know we’ve been right all along: that  this is the next great enterprise software category.

Jive has come a long way in the past year but we’re far from done. Here’s what we have in store the next 12 months:

• We’re going to be aggressive. We will maintain our  leadership position and establish Jive as the premium brand for Social Business Software.
• Innovation is everything. We will expand our product through our own organic development efforts and through strategic acquisitions.
• Extend our reach. We will be working with more enterprises  through direct and indirect channels.
• Deliver customer success on a grand scale. Enterprises are using SBS to solve big business challenges, and Jive has the experience, and talent to deliver value.

And if you thought last year was fun to watch Jive, stay tuned!

During this roller-coaster economy, it’s crucial for financial services companies to provide innovative and cost-effective services to their clients. While some may think of financial services as being more traditional, Fiserv is turning this assumption on its head as they tap into Jive Social Business Software for communication, collaboration, and most importantly innovation.  Using Jive SBS, Fiserv introduced the Boardroom Series, a great, industry-first example of how bank and credit union executives can harness social technology to their advantage. Read more about it in Fiserv's announcement on the Boardroom Series and use of Jive SBS.

This new customer community is a key differentiator for Fiserv since there isn’t anything else like it within the industry today, and most importantly, it’s providing a huge value-add to their clients.  The numbers are telling of the momentum it has gained in just the past six months.  Fiserv launched the Boardroom Series in the summer of 2009 and so far has enrolled more than 2,300 executives, representing more than 1,000 banks and 600 credit unions, about ten percent of its client base.

Fiserv chose Jive because of our powerful scalability, customization, and flexibility options, as well as Jive’s thought leadership within the industry.  Since the launch last summer, we have witnessed great success stories from Fiserv and its customers as a result of the Boardroom Series.  Jive is thrilled to provide the technology backbone to help propel this success, and it is another great opportunity for us to continue to expand Jive’s versatility.

If you’re wondering if a bet on social software depends on smoother market conditions, consider Fiserv’s success. The reality is that SBS is a critical solution, no matter what the "stop and go" economy has served up.

"I believe in being an innovator."

  - Walt Disney

I've often quoted Walt Disney in presentations because his vision and passion for innovation resulted in entertainment experiences the world had never seen. And over half a century later the company he founded continues to deliver those experiences today.

Years ago I attended a seminar at Walt Disney World, and the cast member presenting asked the audience "how many of you are creative and have big ideas." We all froze, and no one raised their hand – perhaps we were all a bit intimidated by our surroundings.

I'm smiling looking back at the moment because the reality is we all have a big idea or two. Ideas can pop into our heads at practically any time. The bigger obstacle most organizations face is how help their teams "run an idea up the flagpole" so it has visibility to the right people at the right time. Employees of companies using Jive SBS have been easily sharing ideas for years because our solution has such powerful collaboration capabilities.

The other obstacle organizations face is how to capture ideas and feedback from the people who "write the check:" their customers. Every day customers share their opinions about products and services online, sometimes with the growing-in-popularity #fail on Twitter. They expect companies to listen, and they expect visibility into what actually happened with their feedback. In many cases, however, customers find themselves screaming into an echo chamber. Annoyed customers and missed opportunities don’t lead to big ideas and breakthrough experiences.

Today, we launched Jive Ideation to bridge between the natural innovation capabilities of Jive SBS with the ideas swimming around in conceivably your best untapped resource – the people who use your products every day. Jive Ideation helps you tap the power of crowd-sourcing and social networks to identify and nurture the best ideas for bigger outcomes.

Isobar interactive agency Molecular Inc. has been at the forefront of the ideation effort for years, helping its clients use crowd-sourcing to drive innovation efforts. We previewed Jive Ideation with Brett Borgeson, Engagement Director at Molecular who had this to say:

"These days, big brands are looking for ways to connect more directly with their customers, making the brand experience as intimate as possible.  For brands reaching a mass audience, this is no small feat. Jive’s Ideation offering gives brands an efficient and powerful way to provide this kind of interaction with customers, allowing them an easy way to influence a company’s direction, or future product offering."

Innovation is a process, not an end game. Capturing your customers' (and employees') ideas will help send your current process into exciting new directions. To quote Disney again:

"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."

Jive Ideation is an awesome example of customer feedback expanding our imagination for extending Jive Social Business Software. To learn more on our latest big idea, check out our webcast, Jive Ideation: Make Your Enterprise a Powerhouse of Innovation, hosted by Adam Mertz, Jive Product Marketing Manager.

We’re off and running with our first award for 2010!  The KMWorld editorial staff recently named Jive Software to the "100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management" for 2010.

For three years running, Jive has been placed on this influential list. It's an immense honor to be included among leading knowledge management companies who are pushing the envelope about enhancing knowledge workers' ability to discover expertise and innovate.

Our approach is definitely cutting-edge and not your "mother’s" knowledge management system.  In the past few years, an entirely new stream of knowledge and information has been unleashed via the social media phenomenon. Jive is at the mouth of this river, catching and bringing forward exactly what enterprises need to be successful.

Jive understands, knowledge capture and its management has to be more like an ecosystem and less like a machine.  It must also be stored in a common, discoverable location that makes it easy to share and collaborate about with others. Most importantly, the knowledge must be shared in context to be appreciated.  That's where a platform like Jive comes in, as it captures knowledge sharing when it happens, not after the fact. For a deeper look at this, check out Gia Lyons' presentation given at KMWorld 2009: http://www.slideshare.net/gialyons/envisioning-the-enterprise-of-the-future

Whether it’s conversations with customers or internal dialogues, the paradigm for capturing knowledge flows and accelerating its dispersion has changed.  The collecting, sharing and collaborating must happen in a way that is organic and intuitive. It has to augment and unlock existing knowledge silos.  With social media monitoring solutions like Jive Market Engagement, organizations can control and benefit from the the free-flowing fire hose of knowledge sharing within social media. And with Jive Connects for Microsoft SharePoint, they can unify and liberate the knowledge typically locked deep in content management systems.  Some customers using Jive for KM include Bupa, Kaiser Permanente, Nike, Swiss Re, CSC, United Business Media, Manheim, Sprint, NetApp, SAP, Luftsansa, T-Mobile, and Yum! Brands.

As the knowledge landscape continues to evolve, we are thrilled that KMWorld recognized us once again as a vital leader.

Today, I am excited to say that I have joined the Jive team as CEO on an interim basis. The reason for the move is simple. We are doing what leaders do when it’s time to aggressively expand the business. And Jive has reached a point where we intend aggressively invest in a number of key areas:

• We’re making additional investments in engineering to deliver more innovation, faster.
• We’re making additional investments in sales and marketing to expand Jive’s reach in existing and new markets.
• We’re making additional investments in our services organization to meet a growing demand for expertise on designing and implementing Social Business Software initiatives.
• We are continuing to be aggressive in evaluating acquisition targets that accelerate our plans.

I have been fortunate to help lead some great technology companies and grow them into market leaders. As a Jive board member, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many Jivers over the last two years. During that time, I have seen many of the same qualities that make companies great: a laser focus on customers and partners, awesome products, and a smart, passionate team. We have a big year lined up, and I look forward to working with everyone in the Jive community as we continue to bring the Social Business Software revolution to enterprises worldwide.

While I’ll be leading Jive through this transition, I do want to recognize and congratulate Dave Hersh on leading Jive to where we are today. Dave’s leadership helped steer Jive through massive tech industry and macroeconomic challenges to become number one in Social Business Software. And Jive customers and partners should know that Dave isn’t going far. As Chairman of the Board, Dave will continue to be active in strategic planning, in meeting with customers, and in inspiring the Jive team to reach for the stars. Dave shares more thoughts on this transition on his JiveTalks blog.

As the market leader, we know expectations are high. We’ll keep driving hard to the hoop, and I look forward to updating you on our progress.

Thanks for your support!

Tony Z.

Jive's history has included many big decisions and transition points. Dave stepping down as our CEO and becoming Chairman definitely qualifies. One thing Jive's co-founder Bill Lynch and I want to recognize Dave for is his consistent leadership at these critical moments. Looking back through our history, there are many company-defining examples -- taking on more office space to prepare for growth, hiring an executive for a role we'd never had before, seeking venture capital and making acquisitons. In each of those cases and many others, Dave was the voice in the room pushing us to think bigger and to go faster. Dave leading the search for a new CEO to take Jive to the next level is absolutely part of that pattern.

I remember one thought experiment Dave led us through in the early years, which was to try to imagine Jive as a one hundred person company. Perhaps the conversation was accompanied by White Russians? Memory is hazy, though it would fit... especially in the NYC days before we Jive moved west and the Portland beer culture invaded. It's amazing to reflect back now and realize that the almost impossible sounding dream from years ago is now reality twice-over. And that we are poised now for so much more.

Bill and I have never been more excited about -- or committed to -- Jive and our mission of making work social again. Thank you Dave for getting us this far and for your continued role in the next phase.

I'm stepping down as CEO and stepping up as Chairman of the Board.

As you can imagine, it's a tough decision for me. But I have no doubts it's the right one. I've had a unique opportunity over the last eight and a half years to lead this company from a small open source project with no revenue to the growing leader of the social business movement.

But after a chance to consider what's best for Jive, I've decided that it's time to step down. The opportunity is massive and the growth is fast and furious.  While I know I could reinvent myself for this next phase and continue to act as the CEO, it would be like trying to change a tire on a car going 120 mph. I would rather support someone else who has "seen the movie" and can ensure that we're doing everything we can to be a great company. We have a lot of big investments to make across the board and it's incredibly important that we find someone who can crank up the volume and lead us through this period.

I wanted to announce this now and make sure the story got out there correctly (since it would likely come out anyway if we tried to run a confidential search). Also, I want to be clear that this was my decision; neither Sequoia Capital nor the board put any pressure on me. Frankly, in their eyes I've done a great job getting results and building out a rockstar organization, and I've always had their full support. The company is poised for greatness. The timing is ideal for bringing on new leadership while I help with the strategy from behind the scenes.

So what happens next? My first major initiative as Chairman will be to find my replacement. The search will start immediately and we expect to have some world class candidates lined up quickly. In the meantime, Tony Zingale, one of our board members, and a big mentor for me over these last few years, has gracefully agreed to step in as interim CEO. Tony's got incredible experience with the big moves we're making, so he'll give us a powerful head start while I focus on finding the next leader.

Jive has been a second family to me, and it's been an honor to have led a team of such passionate and talented people. And it's not just our employees who have inspired me, but also our customers. It's been a extraordinary ride and I'm thankful to have had the opportunity to grow as a person along with the company. Your support over the years has been fuel for my own journey as well as Jive's.

So thank you all. I look forward to keeping the momentum going as I step into the role of Chairman.

I couldn't resist but think of the classic clip from Ellen Degeneres' stand up act when I was jotting down ideas for this blog. While I realize we may never completely say "farewell" to email, it's fascinating to see questions on the future of email make their way to center stage.

Back in October, Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal started an online firestorm with her article, "Why Email No Longer Rules," generating a heated debate among readers, with 200 people commenting about whether or not email is in a death spiral.

Fast forward just a few months, and now Gartner weighs in on the subject in their Gartner Predicts 2010: Social Software is an Enterprise Reality report which leads with this little bombshell:

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

Here's the "wake up and smell the coffee" reality: Social Business Software is much better equipped than e-mail to handle the rich business conversations that are a reality of today's flattened world. And SBS is an incredible tool for leveraging the right people at the right time to help you work better. As we're fond of saying at Jive, "reply all" is no way to collaborate. The report went on to say, "social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities" and that changing demographics "will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications" over the next four years.

Social Business Software is an enterprise reality, but it’s not all unicorns and rainbows. Gartner also notes that IT-led efforts to "bolt-on" social features to existing platforms will result in a "more than 70 percent failure rate." No doubt that you will hear a lot about trying to make big IT implementations "more social," but it takes a lot more than adding a Facebook-ish interface or opening a support case from a tweet to make business social. Jive has built a native SBS platform over nine years of working closely with some of the largest - and most innovative - companies in the world. Companies who have their sights set on big outcomes, and are using Jive SBS today to achieve those outcomes.

If you're looking to move beyond "reply all," give us a call. We'd love to share more on how the world's #1 rated Social Business Software solution can make an immediate impact on your business.

• Social media is either an uncontrolled X factor that keeps you up at night, or a new source of actionable intelligence you can put to work in powerful new ways. It comes down to whether you have the right tools in place, and whether you have empowered the organization to jump in.
• It’s also now clear that social media is a new communication channel for customer service, maybe the most important one yet. The evolution started with phone support, then help tickets, then email, then Web-based support—each step brought companies closer to their customers. The social Web is the next step, and it brings you closer than you’ve ever been, in real-time. As long as you’re set up to use it, that is—otherwise, it’s the other guy who’s getting closer to your customers.

When a Jive customer is prominently featured twice in the media in one week - including in The Economist - you know that customer is doing something special with Social Business Software!

That customer is the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and in this week's The Economist magazine you'll find the DIA featured in the magazine's special report on social networking in the workplace. A-Space, the DIA's Jive-powered secure social networking platform, connects over 14,000 members of the U.S. intelligence community. We're thrilled to see A-Space program manager Ahmad Ishaq and his colleagues highlighted for the work they're doing to break down information silos in an innovative application of Social Business Software. And that second story I mentioned on the DIA? OhMyGov this week included A-Space in their list of top government social networks. If you’d like to learn more about A-Space, join us for a live webcast on February 10th. I'll be speaking with Ahmad about the DIA's journey with Social Business Software, focusing on topics including techniques for increasing adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies.

We are also thrilled to see The Economist covering what we’ve been seeing over the past year – Social Business Software has become mainstream in business. Gone are questions like "are these technologies a good fit for the workplace?" Now the questions include "how fast can I implement Social Business Software?" as companies look to impact everything from generating new product ideas faster to compressing product life cycles to shortening sales cycles and of course improving customer satisfaction rates. Or, in the case of the DIA, how many lives are saved. As reporter Martin Giles points out in the article, “… In the corporate world such hoarding (of information) leads to lost profits. In the world of intelligence it can lead to lost lives.”

Social Business Software has come a long way from being seen as simply "Facebook for business." For more proof points, just check out the announcement we made earlier this week on Toshiba America Business Systems (TABS) and their implementation of Jive Social Business Software (SBS) to improve channel performance.

From all of us at Jive, congratulations to our friends at the DIA and to the hundreds of global organizations - including more than 25% of the Fortune 100 - who are putting Jive SBS to work in transforming their organizations. We're honored to be your business partner, and to help you set the pace for business for the next decade.

Over the last couple years, as part of Jive's Product Marketing team, it's been amazing to watch the impact that social media has had on marketing.  There is no doubt that Marketing's world has changed forever.  Whether you believe it or not, the fact is that customers have never had more power and higher expectations around authentic dialogue.  Check out this video if you still have doubts.   Or better yet check out Paul Greenberg's new book, CRM at the Speed of Light 4th Edition.  The Jive team had the pleasure of working with Paul here at the Jive offices the last two days.  I learned a ton, and also was happy to hear Paul's positive feedback towards several of the customer examples we showed him and how they support social CRM strategies.

However, as I prepare for next week's webcast with Steve Ziemba, Dir. of Social Media at WOMMA, and Darren Guarnaccia, VP of Prod. Marketing at Sitecore, and reflect on the panel discussions I was on at the Gilbane conference just last month, I still see many of us Marketer's in a state of mind of 'Where do I start?' or 'What KPI's will social help drive?'.

So that's exactly where I'm going to focus my discussion, as part two of this 90 minute webcast.  I plan on covering similar real-world examples we walked Paul through -- Marketers out in the wild using Jive SBS to turn this conversation economy to their advantage -- RIM, IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group), National Instruments, Intel, or Bank of America. Maybe others...still finalizing which will provide the best lessons that you can take home and use in your organization.

It's going to be great though, I promise. A few of the key areas I'll be hitting, include:

• The best way to get started engaging targeted audiences 
  • How to find your influencers and turn them into brand champions
• Examples of becoming a conversation hub
  
  • How to ignite and leverage the passion of your advocates to drive Marketing KPI's
• Growing your existing customer relationships 
  • How to integrate social with more traditional customer marketing campaigns such as the annual conference.

I'd love to have you join us:

Date: Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Time: 2:00 pm Eastern / 11:00 am Pacific
Duration: 90 Minutes (First half will be Darren - 7 Habits for Website Conversions)

Click here for event registration and details

Nothing makes our day like a customer being recognized for “excellence” in their use of Social Business Software.  The Society for New Communications Research recently presented the prestigious SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards to not one, but FOUR of our customers: Manheim, NetApp, SAP and Sprint. The detailed case studies found here truly capture the essence of the biggest issues facing enterprises as we move into 2010 and beyond.  It’s anything but business as usual.

For Manheim, their Jive implementation needed to show senior management, “the business benefits of social and how it will be crucial in helping us meet our changing communications needs,” according to Jennifer Bouani from Manheim.  This is an issue many companies face, and the case study has some wonderful insights into how they pulled off such great success.

Take Sprint as another example – they launched an internal community to positively impact its reputation among employees and building brand ambassadors from the inside out, calling the community “Sprint Space.”  Sprint Space is open to all 49,000 employees, and from what Sprint has reported, they are seeing high levels of adoption among its customer facing employees in retail store and customer service operations - approximately 75% of Sprint's employee base.

NetApp launched NetApp Live using Jive SBS as part of a major rebranding effort to provide employees with a new tool to help them help customers "Go further, faster." After an initial pilot for just over 1,000 users, adoption jumped to more than 8,468 in a little over 12 months.

Lastly, SAP America was recognized for excellence in Collaboration and Co-Creation for its University Alliance Program which is based on Jive SBS. The University Alliance Program represents 900 member campuses in more than 40 countries. To date, over 175,000 students are registered on the system with a goal to have over one million students active in the community by 2012.  Using the system, hundreds of jobs have been filled by applicants who were connected to the community via the job board and the community has generated interest among the larger SAP community network. It is now accessed via the top link tab across the entire system -- as seen by 1.8 million SAP users.

The people behind these initiatives are truly the heroes of the Social Business Software movement – the people changing the way we all work.  We congratulate each of you, and thank you for your perseverance and vision.

Ever noticed how some companies are able to not only survive tough economic conditions, but actually excel?  Jive customer ArcSight is one of those companies.

As a bit of background, ArcSight, who recently announced 39% year over year growth during their Q2 earnings call, provides security and compliance management solutions that protect businesses and government agencies.  Their customer list is impressive – T-Mobile, McAfee, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the FAA... the list goes on.

What I found most interesting about them was this – nearly 50% of ArcSight’s revenue comes from existing customers.  With this in mind, they re-launched a new and improved version of their external community (powered by Jive's public community software) at their user conference that encourages customers to connect with each other to share mission critical information, and to encourage each other with stories of success or trials and errors.  For the notoriously private, "close to the vest" security community, this is a very big deal.  It turns out, there was a tremendous hunger to share and receive information with trusted associates about what’s working and not working… all they needed was the right communications channel, which is what PROTECT 724 has become.

Also, a key engine powering their solution is the information shared by customers including content they’ve created, and rules that alert when malicious activity occurs in the network. In other words, the more customers who share the ArcSight content, the stronger the solution becomes.  Although the community only launched in mid-Sept, they have already seen a significant uptick in the number of people sharing.

For ArcSight, this is only the beginning.  In the second and third phases of their community plans, they’ll be introducing greater levels of sophistication in what Social Business Software can do for their business and their customers.

My Mom always likes to put everything in a positive light. We call it her "golden paintbrush." She can take any crappy piece of news and find some way to make it look positive. It's a great trait, but sometimes you're like "c'mon….the dog died! It sucks and that's it."

Well a lot of these momentum releases from companies can be like that. They try to put the golden paintbrush on their results and do what they can to make it look like the dog dying is a good thing. Well, I can't tell you how great it is to have a company like Jive at this point in time where I don't have to do that. 2009 rocked.

Like a lot of companies, we went in with a "hunker down" philosophy. But we worked incredibly hard to put ourselves in the best position possible going into 2010. And thanks to our amazing customers, partners, employees and community we have done just that. We have furthered our vision in a dramatic way and secured our leadership position in the space.

I am incredibly proud of our team and their dedication, optimism, talent, and unstoppable drive to make big things happen. And now, after a very brief chance to relax over the holidays, we're back at it with our Worldwide 2010 Kickoff. And being together here with our extended team, it's clear how much we have accomplished.

The last three months of 2009 were truly telling of how far we've come – from the inaugural JiveWorld 2009 community conference, to the release of Jive SBS 4.0, to Gartner's positioning of Jive as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant report to the great financial results and new customer list. Here's a few of the items that make my life a lot more enjoyable – and that need no golden paintbrush.

• Financials – For 2009, we increased our full year revenue 85 percent over 2008, capping the most successful year in Jive's history, and we were cash flow positive for the year.
• Customers – We had another record year for new and renewed business including Booz Allen Hamilton, Bupa, EMC, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Kaiser Permanente, Life Technologies, Manheim, Musician's Friend, Qualcomm, SAP, Scheels Sports, Sling Media, Sprint, StrongMail, Swiss Re and United Business Media Limited.  In addition, Jive hosted its first Annual Jive Social Business Software (SBS) Awards at JiveWorld09.  Six customers: United Business Media (UBM), NIKE Inc., National Journal Group, CSC, Kaiser Permanente, and Swiss Re were awarded for their outstanding achievements exemplifying the business outcomes that Social Business Software can generate.
• Product – 2009 was our most ambitious and productive year of product innovation in our history. Starting with Jive SBS 3.0 in March, we followed up with the first cloud edition of Jive SBS, and then finished the year strong with a string of new solutions in the fall that was capped off by  the release of Jive SBS 4.0 in October. We also embarked on an exciting new strategy to extend a social layer across an organization's content silos. The first module under the new strategy, released in October, is Jive Connects for Microsoft SharePoint, a deep integration between Jive SBS and Microsoft SharePoint.
• Community – We sold out our inaugural JiveWorld Conference in San Francisco almost a month in advance, and it was a huge success with the attendees.  We're already planning next year's event and it promises to be twice as big and interesting.

Our momentum and progress only motivates us to serve our customers and innovate even more.  We're making some big investments this year and are excited for what's in store. The Filtrbox acquisition is a big start, and we've got a lot more coming. Thankfully, it doesn't look like I'll need the paintbrush anytime soon.

I'm so excited that Jive is entering 2010 with the acquisition of Filtrbox to accelerate our social strategy. This acquisition is about real time monitoring and engagement to help enterprises be PROACTIVE AND REACTIVE, moving social media monitoring (SMM) and listening platforms beyond their limited scope of managing brand disruptions. SMM is useful technology, but when social media monitoring is seamlessly unified with Jive SBS something wonderful happens.

Leading up to today:

In January of 2009 Forrester published a report titled The Listening Platform Landscape followed up immediately with The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q1 2009. In many ways these reports were a much needed recognition that times were changing.  Forrester observed that the age of Brand Monitoring was over saying, “If marketers are to survive and thrive in this connected world, they must mine—not just monitor—these conversations to glean insights that inform future strategy.”  With the benefit of another year behind us it is clear Forrester was right about the death of Brand Monitoring, but the last year has taught us that the vision of Listening Platforms needs to be broader than this.

Mining of conversations and sentiment by marketers ultimately has the same fatal flaw as the Brand Monitoring tools—it is too abstracted and isolated from any kind of true action. It's really no different from the mindset that watched customers talk to each other from behind a one way mirror – they took notes, they formed judgments, they wrote reports, but they never entered into the dialogue.  Real customer insights come from conversation, not observation. I feel the most damning evidence that the thinking has not progressed far enough here is that the Forrester Wave™: Brand Monitoring, Q3 2006 looks remarkably similar to the Listening Platform Wave of 2009—as represented, this is at best an evolution, not a revolution.

A new era:

The real opportunity is not about mining, but engagement.  And it is not just for marketing or the CMO, but for anyone at any company who wants to be closer to their customers.  2009 has been a great year for examples of how companies are starting to realize the potential of this technology.  Engineering, Products, Marketing, Customer Service, Sales, and even corporate executives have taken advantage of the chance to enter into an open dialogue. Their handling of praise and criticism entered into the annals of the internet for the judgment of every future person who considers doing business with them.

As Jive contemplated how to best empower our own customers to take advantage of this technology we came to a few immediate conclusions:

1. Ubiquity. Access to the customer needs to be available throughout a company—not just the domain of marketing. This means the solution needs to be affordable, easy to use, and not discourage its adoption by charging more when employees want to keep an eye on additional areas of interest.
2. Be Here Now. So many vendors in this space are distracted with accumulating massive histories for “mining” customer sentiment. We believe the bigger priority is around managing influencers and lightning rod events. Identifying these immediately and responding authentically should be the priorities.  In the real time web what happened a year ago, while interesting, is largely irrelevant.  You are being judged on how you handle your evangelists and critics today.
3. Engagement. So much energy is being put into listening. But other than crude workflow and email tools, little is being done to facilitate a real conversation.  There are two critical components in my mind: 1) You need to be able to get the right information to the right people quickly, whether you know who they are or not; and 2) You need to be able to respond in the same context in which the conversation is taking place while it is taking place. It doesn't matter whether it is happening on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, a blog, or somewhere else.

It is for these reasons that Jive selected Filtrbox to be an integral component of our Social Business Software (SBS) platform.  They are thinking about the same things we are: How can companies engage with a customer to provide them the experience that they want?  Their technology focuses on being affordable enough to put in the hands of an entire company who can all be engaging on different topics; easy enough to use that you don't need legions of services to get up and running; and most importantly focused on engaging in the conversation that is happening now where it is happening.

I'm thrilled for what our combined forces will enable Jive to do for its customer base. A socially connected workforce means nothing if it is not connected to the customers it serves. It is time for enterprise software vendors to help companies provide experiences for customers that make them feel valued, important, and heard.

As you may have just seen in our press release, we're kicking 2010 off in a big way with our acquisition of Filtrbox. Needless to say, we're thrilled about bringing them into the fold here at Jive, as this is a category-busting acquisition that moves us closer to our vision of enabling the real-time enterprise.

As we begin 2010, the global economy has truly become a conversation economy, where the social web is fueling faster and smarter business decisions.  While search was king in the first generations of the Web, conversation has become a very powerful force that will continue to grow over the coming years. Meanwhile, the application of social media monitoring today as a listening platform is really just the tip of the iceberg. Businesses are only starting to take advantage of the real-time web.  As the social layer that connects people, content, and activities across the extended enterprise, Jive's vision is to serve as a company's real-time business hub by providing traction in four business-critical areas:

• Velocity: the ability for companies to make decisions driven by conversations inside the organization and in the marketplace
• Authenticity: the ability to participate in a real-time, two-way dialog internally and externally
• Engagement: putting the focus of Social Business Software on employees, customers and partners, versus simply processes and data
• Transparency: the ability to hold business-critical conversations without regard to organizational or functional divides or time and distance barriers

We looked at all of the top providers in the space, and Filtrbox truly wowed us with incredible technology, a similar vision for the real-time enterprise, and an accessible, user-friendly application that makes it easy to prioritize feeds and dial the "noise" up or down to manage information overload.

If you are interested in hearing more about how Filtrbox will complement Jive's product offering, Chris Morace gives a great perspective on this acquisition in his blog post today, in addition to a detailed FAQ on our website.

The acquisition of Filtrbox signifies a major step in the future of SBS, as social media listening and engagement goes from niche technology to a powerful part of the overall equation.  We're certain that our customers will see a huge benefit from this combination and are hopeful that it will inspire them to transform the way that business is done.

As you may have just seen in our press release, we're kicking 2010 off in a big way with our acquisition of Filtrbox. Needless to say, we're thrilled about bringing them into the fold here at Jive, as this is a category-busting acquisition that moves us closer to our vision of enabling the real-time enterprise.

As we begin 2010, the global economy has truly become a conversation economy, where the social web is fueling faster and smarter business decisions.  While search was king in the first generations of the Web, conversation has become a very powerful force that will continue to grow over the coming years. Meanwhile, the application of social media monitoring today as a listening platform is really just the tip of the iceberg. Businesses are only starting to take advantage of the real-time web.  As the social layer that connects people, content, and activities across the extended enterprise, Jive's vision is to serve as a company's real-time business hub by providing traction in four business-critical areas:

• Velocity: the ability for companies to make decisions driven by conversations inside the organization and in the marketplace
• Authenticity: the ability to participate in a real-time, two-way dialog internally and externally
• Engagement: putting the focus of Social Business Software on employees, customers and partners, versus simply processes and data
• Transparency: the ability to hold business-critical conversations without regard to organizational or functional divides or time and distance barriers

We looked at all of the top providers in the space, and Filtrbox truly wowed us with incredible technology, a similar vision for the real-time enterprise, and an accessible, user-friendly application that makes it easy to prioritize feeds and dial the "noise" up or down to manage information overload.

If you are interested in hearing more about how Filtrbox will complement Jive's product offering, Chris Morace gives a great perspective on this acquisition in his blog post today, in addition to a detailed FAQ on our website.

The acquisition of Filtrbox signifies a major step in the future of SBS, as social media listening and engagement goes from niche technology to a powerful part of the overall equation.  We're certain that our customers will see a huge benefit from this combination and are hopeful that it will inspire them to transform the way that business is done.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, the article Squeezing Web Sites Onto Cellphones captures one of the biggest questions being bandied about in marketing organizations the world over - how much, or how little do customers want and need via their cell phones?  And perhaps the even messier question – how on earth does one go about catering to and developing for the multitude of different devices?

The stats do speak for themselves – by the end of 2011 174 million people will be accessing social media from their mobile devices.  67% of people already work wirelessly to get their jobs done. We're all spending growing amounts of time interacting with our "community"—however we define it—and creating lots of content via our smart phones. As a result businesses large and small must determine how to best serve our evolving needs.

Delivering a rich mobile experience really boils down to two approaches – a thin, basic application that stretches across a multitude of platforms, or a more robust approach, developing rich experiences that tap into the benefits and unique offerings of each device and platform.

As I mentioned in the article, Jive truly believes the magic happens when you're able to go deep with functionality.  Does it take longer to develop? Of course.  But just ask our customers: it’s worth the wait.  Take for example our recent launch of Jive SBS for the iPhone.  Because we developed a native application, we deliver a gorgeous interface that takes full advantage of the iPhone, giving users the ability to publish blogs, upload photos, find people easily within Jive, and publish updates with geo-location.

But don’t worry, we’re not stopping there. 2010 will be another year of jaw dropping innovation for Jive, so get ready to be wowed.

I’ve never been so happy to unpack boxes. That’s just one of the memorable scenes happening at Jive’s brand new Bay Area home at 735 Emerson in downtown Palo Alto. We moved into this great space (which formerly housed Ning) after outgrowing our first Palo Alto space in only five months. Those of us in that first “Jive South” office quickly learned how to optimize space on a weekly basis as more and more employees joined. But now we feel like we have a great home that gives us plenty of room to grow as we expand our Silicon Valley team.

The other scene unfolding are the final touches for tonight’s Open House event to celebrate our new digs. If you are in the area, come join us tonight (November 19) from 4-7pm for some food and drinks. A good number of the Jive engineering team will be joining me to honor their efforts in launching Jive SBS 4.0 last month – the biggest bundle of innovation in our company’s history. Please RSVP to events@jivesoftware.com so we get you on the list.

Another major reason for the Open House -- Jive is aggressively hiring product management and engineering positions to help with our expansion efforts. It’s no secret that the Bay Area is a cradle of incredible tech talent, and we’d like to meet more of you and share the excitement of what it’s like to lead the Social Business Software revolution. The Open House is a great place to get familiar with the team and hear about what we’ve done and where we’re going.