Social media archiving meets e-mail archiving in new partnership

Arkovi developer BMRW & Associates Inc. and MessageWatcher LLC have formed a strategic partnership that together can provide financial advisers with a comprehensive archiving service that covers both their e-mail and social media needs. Social media archiving service Arkovi was launched into public beta back in November of 2009 (read this post for a basic understanding of how the online service works). The Arkovi platform encompasses Facebook personal and fan pages, LinkedIn, Twitter as well as RSS integration for blogs, blog comments, social bookmarking, YouTube activity and other social networks and web searches. Blane Warrene, chief executive and co-founder of BMRW and I exchanged e-mails on what the new partnership means. Between them the organizations bring together compliance and archiving expertise from not only financial services but the legal and healthcare sectors as well. In a nutshell the integration between the platforms of the two offerings allows customers to have combined access to Arkovi's aggregation and archiving capabilities (for capturing their social media content) and the MessageWatcher e-mail compliance and surveillance system with its dashboard for reviewing, reporting and retrieval of both types of data. In terms of technology he explained that the data integration between Arkovi and MessageWatcher occurs at the XML/web service tier. That is where the Arkovi social archive data is mapped into the MessageWatcher archiving platform on a regular basis. “A customer will then have all messaging consolidated — e-mail, instant messaging and social messaging — at one central compliance/surveillance dashboard as a MessageWatcher user,” wrote Mr. Warrene. In terms of untangling where an adviser is actually getting the service from, Mr. Warrene explained that MailBanc (a subsidiary of Market Counsel LLC) is the reseller dedicated to the financial services space, (including broker-dealers and RIA firms). MessageWatcher, on the other hand, handles markets outside of financial services. “This integration covers both MessageWatcher and MailBanc users who also use Arkovi,” he wrote. I told you about some significant updates to the Arkovi service back in June, which included improvements to pre-screening tools and new search dashboard among other things. Pricing Arkovi and MessageWatcher are offering a mutual discount in the range of 5% off of their retail pricing for their joint customers. MessageWatcher pricing is $5 to $7 per user per month. Arkovi offers two different plans at $39 and $99 per month respectively. The $39-per-month plan is for sole practitioners who also need enterprise features and integration, like this partnership, and includes all features within Arkovi for the business principal and an assistant. The latter, $99-per-month package includes their enterprise offering for five users (additional users can be added at $10 per user per month with discounts at 100, 500 and 1000 users). To sum up “This is a natural fit at the intersection of ediscovery and regulatory rules for email and social media communications,” wrote Mr. Warrene in the announcement's prepared statement. “This combined solution will further assist our clients in mitigating risky employee behavior and affordably deal with legal discovery (e-discovery) requests,” wrote Craig Dinan, president at MessageWatcher LLC in the same announcement. At first blush this offering seems comparable, at least in terms of the outcome, to integrations that have been carried out by e-mail hosting, compliance and archiving providers LiveOffice and Smarsh with social media middleware provider Socialware. There is also the comprehensive Socialite social media security application rolled out by Facetime Communications in August. In terms of technology, there are significant differences in the approaches taken by all of these. And there are still other providers (NRS for example) and enterprise offerings (Dexrex for example) in this realm as well. I'll have to delve further into just how comparable all these offerings are on a feature and cost basis at a later date. For more information, including how to contact the companies, visit them online: Arkovi MessageWatcher MailBanc Related stories: Social Media: Reps, advisers experiment despite compliance concerns FaceTime launches security app for social networks Cambridge Investment Research undertakes social networking pilot using Socialware Making the most of social networking Advisers approach Google's Buzz with caution Socialware could bring B-Ds, large RIA firms into the modern world Arkovi, hope for advisers who want to tweet – but not delete New networking site for advisers said to comply with Finra regs LinkedFA responds LinkedFA NRS introduces social networking capture into new version of compliance technology Dexrex on social media Investors using social media to glean investment advice, study shows MailBanc compliance platform