FirstRain Unveils FirstTweets™, Bringing Business-Relevant Twitter Intelligence to Sales and Marketing Teams for the First Time

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Analytics software company FirstRain has announced the release of FirstTweets™, the world's first solution for extracting business-relevant Twitter intelligence for sales, marketing and senior leadership teams.

FirstTweets™ delivers real-time industry- and customer-specific information to uncover revenue opportunities, including customer developments, industry trends, news, market analysis, emerging themes and much more. FirstTweets™ delivers the information directly into CRM systems, social enterprise platforms, iPads and other mobile devices.

"Like the browser did for the Internet and the iPod did for digital music, FirstTweets™ is a breakthrough technology that takes a powerful, yet time-consuming capability and harnesses it for practical, daily use. FirstTweets™ collects and organizes business-relevant intelligence from Twitter, which until now has been a time-consuming and unorganized burden on the business professional," said FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher. "For the first time, busy executives will have the ability to easily and effectively access the incredible wealth of customer and industry intelligence flowing through the Twitter stream every day. FirstTweets™ solves the major challenge of Twitter for most business professionals: how to get real, daily business value from Twitter without living a Twitter lifestyle."

Unlike keyword-based media monitoring and public relations-focused applications such as Radian6 and Meltwater News, FirstRain's unique and powerful technology takes the full fire hose of 250 million tweets per day and applies patented semantic analytics and algorithms to uncover, categorize and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant intelligence about global companies, industries and business topics. This information can then be easily integrated into the wide range of mobile devices, social platforms and other workflow systems that sales and marketing professionals use when looking for the kind of daily intelligence that increases revenue for their businesses.

"We are bombarded with information daily," says Sue Feldman, IDC's vice president for search and discovery technologies.  "Most of the information is fairly insignificant, but the sheer volume of what we receive obscures what's important and relevant.  New tools, like FirstRain's FirstTweets, may help us cope by surfacing what's important and new and suppressing what's duplicated or marginal.  What we all need to know today is not what's happening but what's happening that we need to pay attention to.  That's the value of these applications."

Newly conducted Twitter dataset analysis reveals that only 0.1 percent of all Twitter content provides quality, business-relevant intelligence (see infographic). FirstRain's engines analyze and filter out not only business-irrelevant content such as entertainment, sports, political, junk and spam tweets, but also the consumer-generated commentary which, while useful for brand management, is not helpful to the majority of sales and marketing professionals and executives.

"FirstRain's semantic algorithms filter out 99.9 percent of all tweets, and yet, that still yields more than 250,000 interesting and relevant business tweets per day," said Herscher. "The combination of FirstRain's semantic modeling, our ability to effectively categorize this intelligence by company, industry and more than 9,000 business topics, then personalizing and delivering it right into your iPad, mobile device or enterprise platform means that business users will get a Twitter-based intelligence solution they've truly never seen before—one that's actually useful in their daily business."

FirstTweets™ can be easily deployed as part of the FirstRain Enterprise Customer Intelligence System, an end-to-end solution that delivers personalized customer and industry intelligence across an entire global enterprise. FirstTweets™ enterprise-wide deployment enables companies to:

• Dramatically improve the value of CRM and SFA investments in Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Fusion and others, delivering the most relevant, revenue-generating customer intelligence directly into a salesperson's account workflow.
• Drive greater engagement within social enterprise platforms such as Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft SharePoint or Yammer, seamlessly integrating the highly specific customer and market intelligence around which users collaborate.
• Better leverage their mobile workforce, delivering real-time business-relevant Twitter and Web intelligence directly into enterprise-deployed iPads, iPhones and Android phones.

Available Wednesday, FirstTweets™ will be included for FirstRain subscribers. For standalone integration into CRM and social enterprise platforms, FirstTweets™ starts at $10,000 per year for 100 users. For more information, visit www.FirstRain.com.

About FirstRain
FirstRain is a pioneer and leader in Enterprise Customer Intelligence. FirstRain's flexible solution provides sales, marketing and finance professionals highly relevant customer and industry information to increase revenue and strengthen customer relationships. The patented semantic analytics technology in FirstRain's Business Monitoring Engine™ instantly cuts through the clutter of consumer-Web content, delivering only highly relevant intelligence from the business Web. FirstRain's Enterprise Customer Intelligence System integrates seamlessly into the world's premiere CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce.com, Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics, Jive and Yammer, and it is incorporated into leading research platforms such as Standard & Poor's Capital IQ, Dun & Bradstreet, FactSet Research Systems, Fidelity.com and Mergent. Based in San Mateo, California, FirstRain also has offices in New York and Gurgaon, India. To read our blog, visit us at http://www.firstrain.com/marketmine/.

SOURCE FirstRain