• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 15, 2009

National Instruments (NI), an electronics test-and-measurement company, will deploy later this week the latest version of Jive Software to help monitor and respond to buzz. Engineers now cling to Twitter, Facebook and other social network sites to discuss NI's products and services.

Jive Software on Tuesday will release Jive Market Engagement, an application that combines social media monitoring with social business software to help marketers understand and respond to the conversation quicker. Deirdre Walsh, community and social media manager at NI, says the application will help her monitor difficult-to-track conversations to take more intelligent action in a meaningful time frame.

Take the discussions around the lab engineer who recently created code using NI software that automatically updates his Twitter status directly from NI's product. That's the kind of stuff Walsh monitors. These messages come and go across social networks all day long. Her goal is to monitor the conversations, but also find ways to grow NI's development community.

This group of about 120,000 community members share sample code, participate in discussion forums and write technical blogs.

Jive Software will allow NI to comment and share buzz from blog posts and message boards that Radian6 monitors and captures across social networks. The posts are pulled into the software, which allows NI to forward the information internally to people who will determine how to respond.

Many times companies have "knee-jerk reactions, followed by a series of 'Reply All' e-mails." Buzz monitoring tools help social media experts, such as Walsh, follow conversations that take place across the Web, as brands struggle to determine the correct response.

Walsh says feedback from the community will be integrated into the next version of NI's product. "Many of those conversations start in a Tweet," she adds. "We haven't released the latest version of LabVIEW, but we will incorporate the feedback into the next version."

Listening to the conversations allowed Walsh to launch an idea board to steer product development and road maps. The feedback goes direct from the social network site to NI's research and development engineers. Today, NI works more with robotics, a direct result from the buzz on the boards.

An older version of Jive's software supports NI developer community discussion boards. The company's forums have been in place in 1999, but Jive has expanded capabilities, enabling members to offer each other advice. About 46% of engineers who post questions on the board are answered by another community member. Walsh says Jive Software allows community members to exchange code, write technical tutorials, upload YouTube videos, and blog directly on the site.

Engineers will not visit the community daily, but they do typically either sign on to Facebook or Twitter. Providing a variety of outlets to voice feedback gives them a soapbox to voice concerns and successes. "We can engage with them wherever they play," Walsh says.

The new version of Jive Market Engagement released Tuesday will let companies listen, measure, engage and share insights to identify real-time issues, collaborate more quickly with a broader set of internal colleagues and engage in dialogue with customers and consumers who can potentially influence others.