twitter

If you go to Facebook and you run a search for “Thai Airways,” you get a search results page like you see in the screenshot immediately below. Which one of the multiple Fan Pages listed there is the official Thai Airways Fan Page? Is there one? Is there more than one?

This situation highlights one of the most common problems facing brands in social media today: Avoiding brand confusion and keeping control of your brand. Though this problem is in no way unique to Facebook, let’s look at the situation facing Thai Airways as an example.

Open Source CMS Resources

Twitter is one of the most popular expressions of the social media boom. Though a very limited "micro-blogging" format -- where speakers are limited to messages that are no more than 140 characters in length -- it has become extremely popular, particularly with early adopters and people who spend a great deal of time online. As someone interested in marketing, I find Twitter to be a way to tap into the buzz from social-minded, technologically-friendly Internet users. Gauging that buzz can be a challenge.

In the course of preparing this year's Open Source CMS Market Share Report, I've spent a fair amount of time researching Twitter as a means of judging buzz and popularity. As a result of that I have bookmarked quite a few tools that I found useful. In this post I share what I've found -- perhaps it will save you some time.

There are 23 tools here, organized topically as follows:

• Primary Sources - slicing the message data directly from Twitter
• Geo-Tracking - tools to find Tweets by location
• Real Time Monitoring - step up and grab the information firehose
• Re-Tweeting Activity - find out who is republishing what
• Trending Topics & URLs - what's hot now and in the recent past
• User Influence - identify the most influential users and their posts