MESSAGE SAVIORS: A DURHAM COMPANY ENSURES NOTHING GETS LOST IN THE BUREAUCRACY OF GOVERNMENT RECORDS.

• Author: Cuthrell, Shannon

Back in 2010, many people knew that Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms would very likely change society dramatically. Goldman Sachs Group and other investors boosted Facebook's valuation past $50 billion. A year later, Twitter raised $800 million and was valued at $8 billion.

Anil Chawla, an IBM software engineer in Durham and self-described "social media geek," did more than take notice. Following the path of many startup founders with full-time jobs, Chawla spent nights and weekends developing an app. Tweety-mail, which allowed users to send out tweets from their email, quickly grew to 30,000 global users. Chawla, who ranked first in his Georgia Tech College of Computing undergraduate class in 2004, gained the confidence to quit IBM after six years and dove into entrepreneurship full time.

Tracking the latest social media trends, Chawla discovered services that archive emails for companies and government entities to comply with public-records laws. While some players in this market were expanding to social media archiving, Chawla saw limitations in the existing products. His new venture, Archive-Social, started applying the practice to audience-to-customer interactions as well as social media posts.

The concept fit perfectly with the evolving meaning of transparency, particularly as government agencies adapted to new accountability rules. For example, the Freedom of Information Act requires bureaucracies to make many internal records accessible to the public.

The company's product captures all posts made to and from customers' accounts. For instance, if a Twitter user shares a crime tip with a local law enforcement agency then later deletes it, that interaction would still be recorded by the software.

Within six months of entering the market, Archive-Social signed the state of North Carolina as a customer. From there, the startup expanded to more areas of government. In 2016, Archive-Social gained a major customer that helped it attract national exposure--the White House under former President Barack Obama. Eight years worth of more than 250,000 social media posts, videos, WhiteHouse.gov content and "We the People" petitions are archived.

Obama is now out of office, but ArchiveSocial has kept growing with more than 2,200 customers, including towns, cities, sheriffs offices and K-12 schools. The Outer Banks town of Duck, with fewer than 400 full-time residents, is a client. So is New York City's municipal government.

...