monitoring

Chatting with the man behind Twilert – the new Twitter alert service

December 4, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Twilert is a new service which aims to bring the ease of Google alerts to the Twitter world. It’s up against Tweetbeep, which has offered alerts for a while, and both offer filtering by location. Twilert does have the edge on flexibility around the selected keywords, specifying both the username of the sender or the recipient of Tweets, and even offering some basic postive/negative attitude reporting.

So it seemed a good idea to find out more about Twilert, and especially how it might differentiate itself further in the future, by speaking to Dan Leach, who is behind the service.

What was the main inspiration for Twilert? Was it something you personally needed for monitoring Twitter in your day job?
The inspiration came about a month ago when I was looking through the Google Alerts I have setup for my various clients (I work in PR and marketing). A lot of the information was dated and I wanted to find a way of seeing what people were really saying and thinking about the brands and products I represent. As an obsessed Twitter fan I wanted to find a way of tracking conversation and opinion on the site without having to sit in front of a Twitter Search page all day. And so, Twilert was born.

What’s the main advantage over other monitoring services?

There are limited options available to people if they want to monitor “tweets”. Aside from the aesthetic differences between Twilerts and its competitors, the two main advantages include:

Full customisation of alerts: Twilerts options reflect exactly that of Twitter’s Search service which mean alerts can be tailored by keywords, author, recipient, location, link-location, and attitude (positive, negative, neutral). This means you can filter out irrelevant tweets from your alerts.
Ease of use: Twilert doesn’t require you to have a Twitter account, nor does it require any technical knowledge of Twitter or search. True story: to ensure the site was as user-friendly as possible, the test subject I used throughout development was my Mum. If she can use it then anyone can!

You’ve obviously built in some quite specific ways to filter messages: by location proximity, whether they include links, and by positive or negative attitude. How are you calculating the attitude of Tweets?

The attitudes of tweets is calculated by Twitter’s emotion algorithm (created first by Summize) which uses certain phrases and words that suggest a positive, negative or neutral phrase and maps them against keywords in the tweet.
It is by no means 100% accurate and will continue to evolve, however it will provide a decent enough snapshot of whether people are speaking positively or negatively about whatever you are tracking.

With such a comprehensive attempt at filtering is there anything you haven’t been able to include?

We have included everything that Twitters allows through its API. With the limited information that is provided with each tweet (author, recipient, location, content) it is difficult to filter them anymore than is already possible on Twilert.

The site was built by Codegent – if you funded the build, does this mean you have plans to recoup your money by monetising Twilert? Or by utilising the data on popular terms etc?

Monetising the service is a long way in the future – Twilert is less than a week old so our focus is 100% on providing a high quality service to our users. However, we will be exploring extended functionality that could be implemented for enterprise users. It is worth stressing though that the basic alert service will always remain free to users.

Twilert is definitely the weapon of choice for anyone looking for regular automated emails which compile your reports within potentially pretty specific criteria. It’s also one of the better looking 3rd party applications for Twitter, and being designed by someone working in PR and Media, it should be well placed to capitalise on the influx of brands and agencies looking to

I’m not the only one questioning Pepsi’s Unfriendlyfeed

December 3, 2008 By Dan Thornton

A few days ago I wrote about the efforts by Pepsi and Coca-Cola to engage their consumers in different ways – Pepsi chose social media, whilst Coca-Cola chose a loyalty reward scheme. And yet they are both making mistakes big enough for me to post ‘How Coke and Pepsi are wasting their online strategy‘.

It’s not surprising that other people are also questioning the policy, like Todd Jordan with his post ‘Pepsi – Are you listening‘ (Found when he mentioned it on Twitter – @Tojosan). Interestingly his post appears to have been picked up by Josh Karpf from Pepsi, commenting as Josh.

It’s good that that someone at Pepsi has picked up on the post, but Josh is repeating the same things many people have already heard:

‘We’re listening, Todd–and making efforts to do just what you are saying.’

‘We need to find a better way to aggregate and share fans’ passion for the company.’

‘As for the Friendfeed room, it was never intended to live as a standalone communications platform for PepsiCo. It’s one of many “outposts” we have launched, and intend to launch going forward as part of our ongoing digital plans. We are actively taking in feedback from across the web and starting to join in on conversations outside of the room, which you may have noticed.’

‘We do need to moderate comments to some extent to make sure profanity is removed. However, we do not moderate at all based on things we do or don’t like.’

‘We are going to introduce more new voices into the room from inside and outside the company very soon. I agree that we need to be more engaged in fan-based communities beyond ones that are launched inside the company. You surely understand that this is a first step for us; and we are moving towards becoming far more open, inclusive, and “closer” to our consumers.’

All pleasant enough, and I’m sure Josh is a nice enough guy. And with people like Steve Rubel involved, you’d hope they’ve got an idea of where they can improve.

But it really doesn’t take that much effort to start making improvements right away – like opening the Friendfeed Room up to everyone. I don’t want more voices inside and outside the company. I want all voices by anyone who has anything interesting to say – and that’s what Pepsi should want too!

They can still moderate, either pre, or preferably post comment. But how on earth do they expect to get closer to a community by dictating strict topics for discussion once every few days? It’s like walking up to the community and shout “You will engage, You will engage, You will engage!” over and over and over.

Funnily enough, although the FriendFeed room is quiet, Twitter has 11 messages mentioning Pepsi in the last 20 minutes via Twitter Search. And in the whole front page there’s not a single message containing profanity.

None of page 2 or 3 either. Mainly because people are treating each other like adults!

And look Pepsi! Look at a blog search for Pepsi and Friendfeed!

Pepsi are you listening? by Todd Jordan
How Coke and Pepsi are wasting their online strategy by Me!
Why blogger outreach can fail by Virginia Nussey
Pepsi’s social media challenge by Jason Lee Miller (focusing on the lack of new suggestions generated)
Pepsi asked for my thoughts by CC Chapman

Responding in the comments of the first or second post is fine, but by the third and fourth I’d be looking to make some immediate changes. After all links 5 and 6 were posted on November 12, 2008. Mine was on November 28th, and Todd’s was today. That’s almost a month without any obvious changes.

Maybe it’s time?

Pepsi can by schnaars (CC licence)

A useful new site, and a future prediction…

October 24, 2008 By Dan Thornton

If you’re reading this elsewhere, it’s from www.thewayoftheweb.net by Dan Thornton…

Had a really good day in London, and met some cool new people, both from within Bauer Media and externally. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of reasons to write about them all shortly!

I spotted a number of sites mentioning Backtype as I was catching up on my RSS feeds on the train home. It’s a fairly elegant way of keeping track of the comments you leave on other websites and blogs – something I tried doing via Delicious, but always failed to keep track of!

If you’re interested, you can keep tabs on me at Backtype.com/DanThornton. The way it tracks comments is by tracking the url you leave – which covers most blogs and similar sites. I doubt there are any Dan Thornton/BadgerGravling impersonators out there, but they’ll appear if they’re dropping my urls! I’ve looked at alternatives like Disqus, and coComment, but never quite saw enough value to invest the time and effort needed. Backtype is far quicker and simpler, and may well encourage me to re-investigate some of the alternatives, depending on what happens – although Friendfeed etc also give a home to comments and conversation about blog spots.

Now the predicition. I’ve been prompted to pick some of the things I think will emerge next on the web (and I’m always happy to also spout my ideas unprompted!). I’ve often made the obvious observations around mobile and smartphones, and the fact that Twitter and microblogging are being adopted by brands, enterprise, celebrities and the mainstream. But the third prediction is one that surprised me a little, the first time it launched out of my mouth!

Twitter has a fair way to go to become really mainstream, but the next site/application to follow it, in my opinion, will be Seesmic. Most people in the tech bubble will have heard of it and web celeb founder Loic le Meur. But, like many emerging sites and applications, it’s taken a little time for the value of the service to become apparent.

For the unitiated, it’s a tool for video conversations by individuals, enabling responses to be threaded into coherence. Which means it overcomes the downside of streaming your life via webcam 24/7 – the dull bits. It’s already popular with some people withing social media – like top journalism lecturer/social media/multimedia person Paul Bradshaw – but now it’s also being used by mainstream media. The BBC has now joined the Washington Post in using the service, as written about by Loic today, and not only have they outlined how it will be used in their first video, but they’re already gaining responses to their first conversation about the financial crisis.

Now listen up, journalist people. Not only can you get a response from the more engaged members of society without having to do ‘voxpops‘ in the local town centre in the pouring rain – but now they’ll even video themselves! See the benefit now?

Case Study: Qik using Twitter

July 11, 2008 By Dan Thornton

We’ve got a new section to highlight and collate all of the best case studies of business and enterprise using microblogging in one place, as well as in individual blog posts. As the list fills up, you’ll be able to see it all, here.

Starting off is an example of customer service on Twitter as David Cushman recently posted.

David tweeted about his problem signing up to Qik on his Nokia N73. He didn’t contact the company directly, and probably would have just given up if left to his own devices. But Jackie Danicki, Director of Marketing at Qik was monitoring what was being said, found the tweet, and also located David’s email address to contact him directly, as well as sending him an SMS with a relevant link. Which led to him posting in praise of the company even before a solution was provided to his problem.

One happy advocate blogging about his experience and sharing his recommendations on and offline before he’s even tried the product!