MarketingProfs Articles : You Don't Drive Me Nuts Anymore!

What makes Twitter so useful is also what makes it difficult to navigate: everyone is spewing what they think, all the time, about anything imaginable. This is good for tracking brand buzz, because when you run a search on Twitter it's like being clairvoyant: the opinions are there, raw and unfiltered. Wow. Great stuff.

Until you try to make sense of it. All those madly intersecting streams of thought often make it hard to put tweet data in context. For instance: A quick skim over any well-populated Twitter feed may yield an SEO tip du jour, an inspirational quote, a hat-tip to your brand, what your cousin had for breakfast, and then—whoa!—someone announcing that a loved one just died.

This can leave even the most inattentive among us feeling dizzy.

But it's a brand new day: Meet Twitoaster, whose modus operandi is to thread and archive Twitter conversations, "bringing you all the background, context and statistics you need."

Does it do what it claims? We tried it out. From the Twitoaster homepage, we clicked on a tweet by @GuyKawasaki, who wanted to gauge opinions about the new layout for Alltop.com. This is what we got: a clean stream of responses to his request, with everything from "Good layout!" to "Is the font on the page smaller?"

You can also terrace results by Boolean operator, related hashtags, relevance or user. Cool stuff.

Playing with these features promises a veritable universe of anecdotal research: Run a search, scroll through the tweets that come up, then start clicking on them to see whole tiny galaxies of conversation. You'll find a richer picture than you could ever have woven on your own.

The Po!nt: Delegate! Let handy tech tools thread some reason into Twitter's rhyme for you. Twitoaster can put the Zeitgeist in context for just about any kind of marketer.

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