• by Tameka Kee , July 1, 2008

Dealing with dozens of feeds from hundreds of Web sites, social networks and blogs may be par for the course when it comes to the new practice of brand reputation management. But online strategists have a slew of new media monitoring tools at their disposal.

Boulder, Colo.-based Filtrbox joins Trackur, Snydey Web and Google Trends as the latest entrant to the space, offering an application that aims to make aggregating, sorting through and sharing online information cheap and simple.

Users plug in a company or person's name, keyword, or other specific bit of information to create a "Filtr," and then the platform pulls in content from mainstream publications, social media sites (including Twitter and FriendFeed) and the blogosphere. Instead of getting multiple RSS feeds, Filtrbox aggregates all the relevant media mentions into a Daily Briefing report. The platform also allows for collaborative sharing and analysis of the results by email, or through sites like Digg, Facebook and Del.icio.us.

Filtrbox's content aggregation and ranking technology grade the incoming info based on contextual relevance, popularity and feedback. The service is available as Filtrbox Pro for individual users and Filtrbox Team for multiple users. The versions allow for the creation of up to 25 Filtrs for $20/month and 100 Filtrs for $100/month, respectively. The company will also scale out the Filtrbox platform for enterprises, and there's a free version that lets users create up to 5 Filtrs.

The application has been in development for just over a year, and the release is built on feedback from over a thousand beta testers. According to an in-house survey, some 65% of the testers were in either executive management or sales and marketing positions. And because roughly 75% of the testers had also been using Google Alerts, the company made sure to integrate them into the Filtrbox.

"You can put Google Alerts in, but you also get graphing capabilities and the ability to post and share articles and groups of figures," said Ari Newman, Filtrbox's president and founder. "It's a straightforward, functional product that combines media intelligence with collaborative features, and isn't oriented around slicing and dicing the data analyst style. You don't need to be a specialist to use it."

Newman said that marketing analysts, as well as PR agents and reporters, were Filtrbox's natural target market, though the company would also be shopping the tool to VC firms, lawyers and other professionals that need to keep track of info on potential partners, startups and industry trends.

"You may not know where that next piece of news is coming from, but reputation and media monitoring is not optional anymore, no matter what line of business you're in," Newman said. "You may not be paying attention, but you can bet your competition is."