ION Digital

After posting my favorite Twitter articles earlier this week, several corporate managers I work with quizzed me about it. What’s Twitter? What’s that about? Some seem to wonder what’s going on behind the Twitter curtain. What are all those people doing?
But most of all, they want to know what can it do for me?

The answer is: a lot. It’s still early in the game for Twitter but you can already see the potential for businesses. Twitter is a fascinating, raging river of comments, observations, opinions, links and more—Facebook on steroids—and provides a potentially powerful tool for communications and other professionals, from sales and marketing to product development.

I’ve only been on Twitter a few months, but already I can see the potential for it on so many levels–as a tool for communications, to build brands and manage customer relations, just to name three. More on these later. But, for starters, it may be best to think of Twitter as a listening and research tool, even a new form of news service—both which are just starting to be appreciated. 

I saw clear evidence of this recently while on Twitter during Obama’s inauguration and the recent Hudson river crash of a U.S. Air plane. Both times, people were reporting the news every second on Twitter; many the Tweets were emotionally-charged. “I’m so glad to be an American now,” said one when Obama finished speaking. “I feel like I’m watching history being made.” Some of the first photos of the U.S. Air flight also showed up on Twitter, taken by a “citizen journalist” on his cell phone.

During the Superbowl, emotions ran high too. When the Steelers got off to a quick touchdown, Cardinal fans screamed: “Someone tell the Cards there’s a game going on. Wake up.” Later near the end of the game, with final seconds ticking down and the game on the line, the Cardinal quarterback fumbled and I could almost hear the chorus of groans: “The ref missed it,” said one Tweet. “his hand was still going forward.” Others disagreed, and you could almost feel the Steeler fans giving high-fives.

Of course I could have heard similar discussions in a sports bar. But the difference is, with Twitter, I could immediately get a pulse of a wide range of hundreds of fans across the Twitter spectrum with the help of some simple tools and a little work. Super Bowl advertisers, for instance, would be able to get instant fan reactions. Simply put, Twitter is a powerful listening tool.

This should be of huge interest to corporate communicators—or anyone who wants to monitor their company’s reputations or do related research. It just requires some time and patience to get up to speed, test-drive the tools and then sort through all the noise. And there is a lot of noise on Twitter.

For starters, simply go to the Twitter search engine, type in your company’s name and start sifting through all the Tweets. Like any search engine search, you’ll have to cut through the noise to see what people are saying. But you’ll find a few gems too, and hopefully some trends.

If you’re not overwhelmed, go over to twitscoop and see what people are buzzing about on Twitter in real time. Type in your company or keyword and check out the conversations, and even see graphs that chart its popularity. See the cloud with the popular keywords? Hover your mouse over one of the words and you’ll see the conversations. Very cool. Tired of this one? Try tweetscan.

You’ll also want to zero in on the leading influencers—those who follow your company or subject. If you’re following technology, check out twitlinks, which aggregates conversations of top technology influencers. Do a search and you may come up with pre-made lists, like this one of the “Top 10 Techies to Follow”. Good list but it’s broad (ranging from social media influencers to more general editors); so you’ll probably want to dig deep to build your follower list.

You can find many Twitter “authorities” to follow at Twithority . What’s cool about this one is it ranks them by either number of followers (authority) or by time, those who most recently posted. There’s some debate over this method and whether it encourages spam, but so far I’ve found it a useful tool.

Here’s another to zero in on top influencers and discussions about particular subjects: Twellow , a sort of Twitter directory of 300,000 users divided into different categories ranging from graphic design to programming to marketing. Many have sub-categories so within “Programming” you can browse and find users who will Tweet all night about PHP, Ruby on Rails, or other programming issues. “Twellowhood” will help you find experts by geography. I clicked on Calif (31,000 registered), and San Francisco (7,028). Some of the names, like Kevin Rose (@kevinrose), Digg founder (99,000 followers) are very familiar but others are not.(you might also want to check out who your influencers are following. For instance, Jack Dorsey, chairman of Twitter (@jack), has nearly 20,000 followers but only follows 344 people).

This is just a few of the research and listening tools on Twitter, and it seems like new ones are constantly emerging. Many big companies like Dell and hundreds of smaller companies and entrepreneurs like Chuck Hester are already monitoring Twitter conversations. I suspect we’ll see a lot more in coming months as Twitter gains more popularity. For more details you can check out Brian Solis’ extensive lists of Twitter tools for communicators and this advanced guide for searching Twitter.

If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can find me here.