We typically let the world know about TweetRiver through Twitter, not a blog, but blogs still have a lot of value. Twitter is changing how people connect, how news breaks, and how companies communicate with their customers but there is still something to using more than 140 characters to explain a message.

A blog gives people a chance to know you, how you think, and find out the quirks that you make you interesting. That’s why we’ve started writing: to give better insights about us, about the things we think about, and what makes us interesting.

The idea for TweetRiver came from watching the Obama campaign and the Skittles/Twitter debacle. We saw that some organizations and brands were using Twitter for more than just sending out messages, like letting people interact around their brand. Of course, the tools to do this effectively weren’t in place and people took advantage of the situation. And then we started TweetRiver.

TweetRiver lets organizations harness the conversations that are taking place on Twitter about a brand, product, or event. We aggregate the tweets about a specified topic and filter out the noise to create a clean, relevant stream that can be embedded in a web page, blog, or wherever it’s needed.

Our tools also allow you to join the conversation you’re hosting. We have authoring controls that make it easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts, grant employees access to different employees, and keep a record of who tweeted what on behalf of your company. Our goal is to make Twitter operational for businesses.

Companies are just now starting to get on Twitter and we expected the thought of using content from Twitter on a website to be pretty foreign, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised. Organizations are approaching us hungry for what TweetRiver will let them do. It’s an understatement to say the response has been great and has us very excited for what we’re going to do over the next few years.