• by Brian Maihack , David L. Smith , March 2, 2009

by David L. Smith, Marcus Pratt, and Brian Maihack

When we first heard of twitter, we thought about it much like many of you probably still do. It's just noise. Who needs to know when someone is having a pizza? But we've had a few epiphanies along the way that have changed our thinking. The bottom line is that Twitter is a news source, and a place for tracking general and specific information in the blogosphere, whether it is about you, your company, your competitors or, well, ordering out for pizza. And the noise level behind something is a good indicator of interest.

News surrounding Twitter is published more frequently than the updates of many users on Twitter. Google Blog Search returns nearly 12 Million results for posts containing "Twitter" during the month of January 2009. By reading a few articles, comments, or blog posts, it becomes apparent that many in the media world do not see the value of Twitter. Twitter.com does not currently sell advertising (though twitter.
jp does), but with comScore reporting about 2 million unique visitors for the month of December, it can mean more to marketers than racket.

Anyone who has not used search.twitter.com should spend at least five minutes playing around with this simple yet powerful tool that does not even require a Twitter account. Twitter Search is great for getting a quick pulse on what the Twittersphere is saying about a certain topic right now, as the results are in near-real-time, and sorted chronologically with the newest tweets at the top of the page. The advanced function allows queries to be further filtered by date, location, person, and even "attitude" (determined simply by the presence of smileys or a question mark). This allows you to filter the data to relate to a specific campaign or many other factors, such as location. In fact, shortly before Israel invaded Gaza, we searched for "within 150 miles of Gaza" - it was very interesting to see the tweets from both Gaza and Tel Aviv on one page. This type of parsing is a key to the future.

Twitter search does lack some functions, however, giving third parties room to improve the experience. TweetGrid, for example, allows users to monitor up to nine terms simultaneously, and refreshes automatically, making it an excellent tool for continual monitoring of multiple terms. For example, someone interested in the immediate responses to SoBe's 3-D Super Bowl ad could set up TweetGrid to monitor "3-D glasses," "SoBe," "Pepsi," "Lizard," or a host of other relevant terms, to provide a quick gauge on response as the spot ran during halftime. Checking these terms on TweetGrid the day after the Super Bowl returns some people linking to the SoBe ad, some Twitterers bashing the Pepsi ad, and tweets around the difficulty of finding a pair of 3-D glasses.

If constantly monitoring TweetGrid sounds like too arduous a task, Twilert allows users to track keywords on Twitter without even opening a Web browser. Like Google News Alerts for Twitter, Twilert allows users to set keyword alerts, and receive an email containing tweets for those terms on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Since Twitter activity happens so rapidly, daily alerts are recommended over weekly or monthly emails for most terms (remember that the Motrin Moms story hit the papers and online news outlets just days after the campaign first aired on television). Even daily checking may not be frequent enough for those who want to closely follow activity around a set of keywords.

Many tools out there attempt to rank Twitter users, even providing the equivalent of a research run, showing reach, velocity and social capital of leading Tweeters. Twitter metrics are not the same as Web metrics, however. On Twinfluence, one such ranking site, reach is defined as: "The number of followers a Twitterer has (first-order followers), plus all of their followers (second-order followers)." Though it should be noted that Twinfluence is a crude maximum estimate, since there will definitely be duplicates and overlaps. For example, guykawasaki shows up at No. 1 with nearly 19 million in "reach," well over the 2 million unique visitors reported by comScore. Twinfluence is working on offline tools that will actually spider Twitter networks, allowing for greater detail and accuracy than allowed using the Twitter API.

TwitterGrader is another authority tool that ranks Twitter users on a scale of 0-100, taking into account the user's network, pace of updates, and a few other data points, but does not attempt to quantify "reach" as Twinfluence does. Yet another tool, Twitterank, ranks Twitterers on the number of @replies to the user, drawing a correlation between replies on Twitter and inbound links on the Web - which is of paramount importance to achieving a high page rank on Google.

TweetRush gives you an idea about the total tweet volume by day (just under 2 million tweets and 400k users per day in the beginning of February 2009), and Tweetlists, which shows the most popular links being tweeted during a given day or week.

The tools mentioned above do a great job of showing users the tweets that contain certain terms or phrases, but provide little insight around the overall volume of specific keywords. Enter Twist, a tool that allows for trending of multiple terms over 7 or 30 days, and designates when a term is "hot." Checking for "Pepsi," "Audi," "SoBe," and "Budweiser" shows a huge spike on Super Bowl Sunday, as all of the terms become hot. Pepsi tops the charts, with SoBe and Budweiser narrowly trailing, with Audi significantly behind. For convenience, Twist also shows the most recent tweets on each topic below the graph.

Trendrr, essentially a mash up of multiple data sources, offers another unique snapshot. Trendrr requires more time than some other tools, as users must log in and select terms and data points to track. Trendrr does not retrieve historical data, so you will only see graphs from the time when tracking was initiated. The upside is that the graphs become much more customizable. Tracking a Mediasmith client, NetApp (makers of enterprise-level data storage solutions) led to some interesting findings. When NetApp was named "Best Company to Work for" by Fortune, the story was picked up by many different outlets ranging from national television to blogs to Twitter. Using Trendrr to track searches on Google, news articles, and tweets for "NetApp" shows just how fast Twitter activity comes and goes. The day of the press release brought NetApp more attention on Twitter than ever before, yet activity subsided to normal levels after two days. Stories on Google News, however, continued to increase as more and more media properties reported on the story. Trendrr can track blog postings, stock prices, Facebook apps, and a host of other metrics, making it well worth the ten minutes it takes to set up an account and begin tracking.

Still, how to track Twitter activity is less important than simply doing it at this point. Whether you feel that Twitter is here to stay, or is simply a fad, is irrelevant. Can marketers and agencies afford to ignore this very vocal focus group of more than 2 million users and growing?

In the future, we should be able to more precisely measure the metrics of individuals on Twitter, and understand how much traffic they are getting, setting up the potential of an adwords type situation where the writer and Twitter share in revenue. We should also be able to do the same for individual topics being written about, thus facilitating keyword advertising. Technologies for both of these situations exist today, so it's just a matter of Twitter deciding to open up apis and determining what this small company of 25 people, who have achieved major influence, wants to be when it grows up.