Web Business by Ken Burbary

Mine the Gold in Social Media through Conversation Search

Google has transformed our lives with its uncanny ability to answer the question, “What is X?”.   Enter any term and Google will tell you what it is and/or how it works. If Google’s spiders can find a web page, you can find the content within it using Google Search.

Enter Social Media.

The proliferation of real-time, mass conversation online is something that Google hasn’t done as good a job at keeping up with. Opportunistic individuals have taken advantage of this fact to create specialized conversation search engines. Currently they do the best job of finding “Who is talking about what, and where”.  There are many tools online that do this. Some, like Social Mention and Samepoint scour a large portion of the social media landscape, while others like Twitter Search focus on a single social network. For purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on demonstrating how you can use advanced features Twitter Search that often get overlooked.

Much like Google search, Twitter search is very straightforward. Enter a term and it will display a results page that shows all mentions of that term, or combination of terms, that are being discussed on Twitter. You can also search by Hashtag to view all Tweets with that tag. These features are only the tip of the iceberg that Twitter Search offers. By clicking the “Advanced Search” link, you’ll see a feature-rich search page that offers.

People Search

Is ideal if you:

• Want to find all tweets from your favorite Twitter personality
• Want to find all tweets to a particular person
• Want to find all tweets mentioning a particular person

These methods of searching can be useful if you want to catch up on a particular topic between people, follow all replies directed to someone, or  monitor buzz on a specific person.

Location Search

Ever wonder who else living  or working in your city is on Twitter? Enter your location and select the distance radius. You’ll most likely find other people, in some cases extremely close, near you that you had no idea about. It’s a great way to expand your Twitter network by adding new conections that bring new and different perspectives.

This method of searching can also be useful when attending conferences or other events, and you want to search & find which other Twitter users are near you.

Date Range Search

This is a great way to find that tweet that you loved but didn’t save, or couldn’t easily find because it happened  more than a day or two ago. Often times, you’ll have a conversation with someone and need to go back and reference one of the tweets. The date range search makes it easy. The only thing you need to remember is a rough idea of when the conversation occurred.

Attitude Search

Automating sentiment analysis has not yet perfected, even with the best natural language processing technologies on the market. Despite being imperfect, there are insights that can be revealed by experimenting with searches to uncover the positive or negative tones in the key topics. Try both, you may uncover something that really surprises you.

Link Search

This is one of my favorite search options. Remember, one of the primary reasons many people tweet is to share links that interest them, or links they think will be valuable to their network. Shared link tweets are an important way to keep up on news, trending topics, and key blog posts. It’s easy to miss links though, because Twitter conversations happen quickly. And your attention span cannot scale with the noise on Twitter. It’s simply not possible, even with tools like Tweetdeck. So, this search method makes it easy to catchup on what you missed.

Enter the username of the person you want to search for link tweets from and check the “Containing Links” box. You’ll be returned their tweets that only contain links. You can then easily scan the links without having to wade through all the conversation in between them.

You can take this even further, by subscribing to the RSS feed generated for any Twitter Search query. Add the feed URL to your favorite reader, and you will have automated your search. I use this method to keep up on link tweets from key folks I follow Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Mack Collier, Aaron Strout and Alan Wolk.

There are surely creative people out there that have invented more sophisticated ways to search twitter conversations, and you’re EXACTLY the people I want to hear from. Please share any power search tips you have!

How I use Tweetdeck to supercharge Twitter

If you’re regularly active on Twitter for any length of time, you can quickly outgrow the standard way of using the service. By standard, I’m referring to the fact that Twitter provides a straightforward and easy to use web interface to update your status and send/receive direct messages. This method of using Twitter works but doesn’t scale efficiently. That is, as your tweet  volume and social interaction increases, the standard tools begin to degrade the exprience. They can require too much effort, cause you to miss important tweets, or make it difficult to follow conversation on specific topics or trends.

Time to enhance your experience by incorporating some Twitter power tools into the mix. While there are many of them out there, few are as important to me as Tweetdeck. According to the the website, Tweetdeck is:

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

In simple terms, Tweetdeck is a program that becomes your window to Twitter. You interact with Twitter through Tweetdeck.

In my terms, Tweetdeck is the killer app for Twitter (translation: kicks ass!) Why? It makes Twitter more efficient. More productive. More manageable. It enables me to get MORE value out of twitter than I would otherwise be able to do.

With Tweetdeck I can:

Segment the people I follow into categories that make sense for me.

This is important. It dramatically reduces the signal to noise ratio, and gives me an unobstructed view into the people and topics that matter to me most. You can easily add/edit/remove people you follow to these categories with a single click. Here I add Scott Monty, someone I admire for the incredible work he is doing with social media at Ford, to the “Thought Leader” group I created.

Tweetdeck has a built in Twitter search feature as well. I use it to search & find topics that I want to monitor. Twitter search on the web is great, but Tweetdeck will continuously update as new tweets come in from the Twitter community. How is this useful? For starters, it’s probably one of the best ways to learn about and follow discussions about sessions at key conferences that are of interest to me, like SXSW, Forrester Consumer Forum, or Web 2.0 Expo. Most often these events are tracked on Twitter by using hashtags. Hashtags are a convention for grouping tweets together. They’re like tags on any blog, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag (thanks to Adam Cohen for originally showing me how to track hashtags)

Using Tweetdeck to create a live feed of an event by searching for hashtags isn’t quite the same as being there, but it does provide useful information and gives you the ability to interact with others that ARE attending. This commonly results in incredibly valuable backchannel discussion, often more interesting than the event itself.

Or for less professional interests, like my favorite hockey team: The Detroit Red Wings

Tweetdeck also shows replies and direct messages (sorry, no screenshot of these!) to you.

Another feature of Tweetdeck that I use regularly is the integrated URL shortening services. These are invaluable because Twitter limits messages to 140 characters. Tweetdeck’s URL shortening saves precious characters when you are including links in your tweet. Whether you prefer tinyurl, twurl, bit.ly, snipurl, or is.gd, Tweetdeck supports them all and more. I prefer using thurl, because it provides some analytics about the link, but that’s a topic for another post. You can use whichever URL shortener you prefer like so:

Tweetdeck does even more than I cover here. I encourage you to download it and give it a try. You’ll need to install the adobe AIR runtime environment before you’re able to install Tweetdeck. If you find yourself liking it, I’d also encourage you to support Tweetdeck’s creator, Iain Dodsworth, by donating a small amount to fund the project.

And if you’re having trouble with Tweetdeck, you’ll find plenty of answers at the customer feedback site.