Well I joined the Twitter land grab. Ho-Sheng Hsiao, Adam Dill, and I are building a Twitter application that will help PR and marketing professionals. (And we want your feedback.) Mike Schinkel has been advising on the project.
Adam is an expert in data reduction and analytical modeling. Ho-Sheng is an expert in Ruby/Merb/Rails & product deployment. Mike is an expert in database design and programming. Me - well I'm the PR guy. We all have regular jobs, but we see an opportunity with the Twitter API to make an impact.
Based on a conversation I had with Scott Burkett, our application takes advantage of Twitter's immediacy. Think of it as an early warning system. It helps you make sense of the sheer volume of tweets out there. Our application provides a distribution of other words that appear along with your key search term. As a result, you can see which topics are emerging or gaining momentum around your brand or company.
Another promising feature measures the influence of the person tweeting. PR is about building relationships. We care about what is being said and how. But we also want to reach those who influence others. This tool helps us identify the most influential.
More than a monitoring tool, our app is intended to help you organize and prioritize. We we are trying to facilitate actionable intelligence that is necessary to ward off a crisis or capitalize on an opportunity. By the time an emerging Twitter trend hits Google's top search results, it may be too late.
We looked at many other Twitter apps. We think there is an opening for a tool that analyzes key terms as well as the level of influence and location of the person tweeting. There is no tool that combines all-in-one functionality that PR and marketing need.
Anna B, at Organic, Inc said in best in her comments to Marshall Kirkpatrick's The Future of Social Marketing posting.
"My biggest pet peeve is that most of these tools still return a high volume of JUNK that takes a long time to sift through to get to the golden nuggets...Many [of them] have some interesting functionality. I haven't found one yet that is the total package."
Soliciting Feedback
Right now we are soliciting feedback. We know our application is still rough. It takes too long to deliver results. (We can't request mltiple profiles at one time.) Currently, we only give data for the most recent 100 tweets for any key word, but we could deliver over 1000 at a time.
We would like to hear from you on what works, what doesn't, and what we can add. The tool can be customized to meet your particular needs.
To be sure, we are at the mercy of Twitter. Thcy control the shots and can change the rules at their discretion. We know that we are not alone. Competition is fierce. Each day it seems a new Twitter application comes out. We knew that going in, but we believe we can make money from our version of actionable intelligence.
Let me get back to you.
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