This start-up is helping the government keep track of social media

When Anil Chawla built a start-up that uses software to archive social media posts, he never imagined that his biggest clients would be government agencies. Chawla, a former IBM engineer, founded ArchiveSocial in 2011 to design an efficient way to store and search social media content. The Durham (NC)-based start-up recently picked up a $100,000 check from Steve Case’s Washington-based investment firm Revolution Ventures. Federal, state and local agencies have embraced the use of social media Web sites such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with citizens, but many do not have an easy way to capture all their interactions to comply with public records laws.

In many states, even deleted posts need to be recorded, but trying to access them once they are gone is virtually impossible or requires a subpoena to the company in question. That’s one problem Kristi Wyatt was trying to solve when she discovered ArchiveSocial. Wyatt is the director of communications and intergovernmental relations for the city of San Marcos (TX), which uses the company’s software. Many officials still use cumbersome manual methods to save their social media posts, she said. Chawla said the company soon realized that government was a huge untapped market. “We discovered that most agencies had gone ahead with social media without figuring out how to comply with archiving laws,” he said. Now 85 percent of the company’s business comes from a mix of federal, state and local customers. ArchiveSocial’s largest federal client is the National Archives and Records Administration.