Indeed, one of the most beautiful things about Twitter is that we’re all on exactly the same playing field; everyday Joes and Janes share the Twittersphere with the world’s most famous celebrities and most influential people. Just as frequently as we receive updates from our colleagues and friends, we get 140-character glimpses into the off-camera lives of our favorite stars. To see a tweet from a nearby friend followed immediately by one from a bejeweled LA starlet is strangely satisfying. It’s a feeling that each person is exactly as far away as any other, and we’re all connected.

Each show’s website should aggregate and feature the tweets of its stars. As opposed to the quickly-stale bio pages for each show member, celebrity tweets are constantly fresh and are voiced in the star’s own words. Your audience doesn’t need the video of last night’s show; they’ve already seen it.  They want the fresh dirt, the behind-the-scenes banter, and the candid thoughts of their favorite contestants. This will keep them coming back, frequently…

…to the tune of millions of ad impressions.

When I go to the Politics section of my online newspaper, why do I not see these flowing realtime sentiments? Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s Director of Media Partnerships, was recently quoted as saying that she “can’t imagine a major event where the audience doesn’t become part of the story itself.” Indeed, Twitter’s own 2008 Election site (election.twitter.com, now defunct) — wherein tweets from the masses about the competing candidates streamed by in realtime during the televised debates — proved to be a perfect first example of this.

Why, when there’s

• a political debate or
• a world disaster (Haiti, Chili) or
• a major sporting event (Canada vs. US in hockey) or
• a foreign election punctuated with gross human rights violations (Iran)

…are there no pages on these news sites devoted to the tweets from the masses?

The answer is fear. Fear of lost readership (and, hand-in-hand, lost ad revenue) or a lawsuit stemming from the off-color, off-topic, and inflammatory tweets that are sure to show. Most large professional publications and F-bombs do not mix.  So what’s an online news organization to do? Today, they fall somewhere on this evolutionary scale:

Avoid Twitter altogether
“It’s a cesspool. I’m not jumping in.”

Promote the following of journalists and summary accounts (@cnnbrk, @msnbc_politics, etc.)
“We’ll tweet the headlines. Follow us, then click through to our site.” By far, most large news organizations fall into this camp.

Embed unfiltered Twitter Search widgets
This is very rare, considering the naturally unfiltered nature of the search results. Huffington Post has been doing this recently for many articles:

Embed Twitter List widgets on a particular topic
Many news sites have created topical Twitter Lists in an attempt to capture the best tweeting voices on a topic. For example:

• @huffingtonpost/health-care-debate
• @foxnews/chile-earthquake
• @nytimes/sxsw

The problem is that Twitter Lists are horrible mechanisms for curating content. These are collections of Twitter accounts, not tweets. As such, they are generally good indicators of experts/authorities on a specific topic, but the tweets generated from this list are not ever guaranteed to be on-topic. Example:

At the very best, the status quo for integrating Twitter into online newspaper sites today is unsatisfying. It’s time to change the status quo. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: SEARCH

We have to start with Twitter search. This casts a wide net to pull in our set of ‘candidate’ tweets. These are the tweets that we *might* end up displaying on our website.

Step 2: FILTER

There’s a good first pass that we can take to clean up this list:

• remove spam (keyword-based, young accounts, trending topic riders, etc.)
• remove retweets
• remove replies
• remove autofeeds (TwitterFeed) and TwitLonger (because the content is naturally going to flow outside of 140 characters)

With this cleaner list, we’re searching for the quality tweets. To be sure, quality is subjective, and is informed by the policies/stance of your specific organization. To support this flexible qualitative search, we should score the tweet based on its content and its author.

Consider:

• Does it contain links? To photos? To videos? On my site, or a different site?
• Do I consider the tweet author an authority on this topic? A list of topical authorities may very well come from a Twitter List, or ad-hoc based on your browsing of the search stream.
• Does it contain one or more hashtags? One or more @mentions?
• Is the tweet very short (4 words or less)? Tweets this short tend to be of lesser quality/value.
• Has this tweet been retweeted? How many times, and by whom?

Weighting each of the above and scoring a tweet based on your weightings should begin to separate the wheat from the chaff. Specify a score threshold, and then keep only those tweets that satisfy it.

Step 3: MODERATE

Even after all of this filtering, manual human moderation of the remaining (substantially smaller set of) tweets is a good idea. For those news sites with a biased view, it often requires a human intellect to select the most appropriate ones for that specific website.  Also, if a moderator sees that, after the above filtering techniques, a separate (but keyword-related) topic is polluting the search stream, they can tweak search and filter settings to fine-tune the results.

Once this moderation step is complete, we’ll have finally whittled down the set of tweets to exactly those which will be visible on the website.

Step 4: TRANSFORM

Now that we have this set of tweets, we need to consider certain presentation-level details to stay in compliance with site policies:

• Are we ok displaying all author profile images as-is? Do we need to provide different/custom avatars? Should they be completely removed?
• Are author names, @mentions, and #hashtags hyperlinked? Where do they go? Directly to Twitter? In the same page or a new page/tab?

The Twitter widget we plan on embedding should support configuration of each of the above attributes.

Step 5: EMBED

We should now be able to easily embed this curated and moderated set of tweets into some page on our website.  Ideally, the integration of these tweets is aesthetically seamless. That is, it should look just like a first-class part of the website. Which…finally…it is.

Ok, now what?

The above 5 steps are critical to news organizations as they consider tapping into Twitter for true realtime reporting. The ecosystem of Twitter tools to support these steps is growing, and it will be incumbent upon news organizations to seek out the best solutions. Listorious and TLISTS are growing into excellent resources for Twitter list discovery, and TweetRiver‘s filtering, moderation, and embedding capabilities are unparalleled. With the proper application of these powerful Twitter tools, we may finally see this vision of Twitter-powered news come to fruition.

First, Respect
We think CoTweet is a great multi-user, multi-account Twitter application. It’s feature-rich and aesthetically gorgeous. Everyone here at TweetRiver has a ton of respect for the product they have built at CoTweet.

That being said, we have some fundamentally different beliefs about how to make Twitter useful and operational for businesses. Here, in a nutshell, are the primary ways we set ourselves apart.

Consuming Tweets: Accounts vs. Topics
Like nearly every existing Twitter client today, CoTweet is account-centric; the tweets you see are organized by the Twitter account to which the tweet was sent. CoTweet will definitely get all the tweets sent TO you. Searches, though, are run ad-hoc in CoTweet; unless you are watching (manually running searches), you will miss tweets relevant to your business.

TweetRiver is account-agnostic; we run constant Twitter searches and organize the tweets into topical streams (e.g., ‘Support’, ‘Product X’, ‘Event Y’). That way, it doesn’t matter if people are tweeting TO you or ABOUT you; we find and segment all of them into meaningful categories.

Moderation and Republishing
TweetRiver is a complete Twitter moderation platform. Approve the tweets of your choice, then embed that moderated stream in any webpage with a single line of javascript. They’re also accessible as an Atom feed or JSON. Conferences use this to display spam-free, content-rich conference tweets. Businesses republish customer testimonial tweets to the web.

CoTweet has no such capability to moderate and republish Twitter streams.

Assigning Tweets
CoTweet enables companies to assign tweets to individual people for followup. This, plus their email-based notification for assigned tweets, works very well for small teams.  TweetRiver, by contrast, grants users access to full streams of tweets with Atom feeds for notification. We see these tweet queues as a more flexible approach, and designed to scale to larger team sizes.

Overall
Functionally, CoTweet and TweetRiver share many of the same basic features you’d expect from any robust Twitter business application: scheduled tweets, bit.ly integration for shortened link tracking, and access-controlled multi-account support, to name a few. As the above bullets indicate, though, there are a few fundamental differences between our products. If your organization has any questions, we’d love to hear from you.  Interested in trying out what TweetRiver has to offer?  We’d love for you to sign up.

Happy tweeting!

With increasing frequency, these businesses are getting on Twitter. Most, for now, are taking their first steps by establishing a personality and communicating with patrons.  These are fantastic, necessary firsts.

As Robert Scoble mentioned in a recent blog post, though, “Twitter has the potential to be a powerful business interaction service”.  Interaction. Restaurants need to move beyond conversational rapport-building and put Twitter to work for them. Here are three ways that they can use TweetRiver to help.

1. Publish customer testimonials
On Twitter, so very frequently, your customers are not talking to you. They’re talking about you. By constantly running Twitter searches for mentions of your business, TweetRiver captures these customer comments. After automatically categorizing these tweets into a ‘testimonials’ stream, you can moderate the stream to approve the most flattering messages, and then embed these customer raves into your restaurant’s website with a single line of javascript.  Voila!  Instant, fresh, spam-free site content from your customers saying how delicious your food is!

2. Extend service beyond the dining room
You are probably already tweeting about your updated hours, daily specials, and time-limited offers. There’s more to Twitter, though, than just broadcasting your message; success will follow those businesses that listen and respond to their customers.

TweetRiver analyzes each incoming tweet and uses rules you define to intelligently route it to the appropriate topical streams. Set up a stream for ‘customer service’ and funnel in tweets with specific positive or negative keywords. See a particularly positive customer comment? Want to handle a particularly negative one? Reach out and respond with a special offer or discount.

3. Accept to-go orders and reservations
Houston’s CoffeeGroundz got some great press last year when they began to accept customer drive-through orders via Twitter direct message. With TweetRiver, it’s a piece of cake for your restaurant to do the same.

Use the same rule-based routing to put ‘online order’ tweets into their own stream; it doesn’t matter if they’re sent publicly or via direct message. Not following some of your customers yet? Multi-select them inside the TweetRiver admin console, and then follow them all with a single click. Once you’ve handled the order, either respond to the customer directly or add an internal-only note to the tweet, marking it as handled. Order up!

When I head out to eat, I normally consider just a few things in choosing a restaurant: price, quality, and convenience. Restaurants will soon learn that they can improve in all of these areas by tapping into Twitter; those that do will be the ones that win my business.

1. There’s more on Twitter than your timeline.

Lots of businesses we talk to are looking at their Twitter timeline.   This, of course, is important.

It only lets you see, though,  the customers, users, and partners that you’re following on Twitter.  Also, your timeline is typically only a small portion of your company’s presence on Twitter.  What about the thousands of people that you’re not following?   What about all the people that are talking about your company and/or  products that don’t know your Twitter screen name or use an abbreviated shorthand?  Are you finding those people and engaging them?

TweetRiver allows your business to pull in all of the tweets to, from, and about your organization.   Pull in your timeline, your mentions, your hashtags, and your product names. What about common phrases?  How do customers talk about your brand or products on Twitter?

It seems like every day that we talk to a customer who says, “I watch this stuff everyday. I had no idea how much I was missing.”

Many existing corporate Twitter clients are very timeline-focused.  They have search capabilities, but they’re offered as a bolted-on appendage; the tweets that are pulled in via a search interface aren’t stored. They’re transient, so if you’re not watching, you miss them.

Other tools are wholly built around search, but don’t take any steps to make those tweets operational for the business.  Without the capability to take action on the tweets, these apps limit themselves to being purely monitoring solutions.

TweetRiver bridges that gap. Its focus: bring all of the tweets about your business to one place, store them, categorize them, route them to the appropriate resource, and allow you take action on them as you see fit.

2. Don’t just read your tweets.

OK, so you’re finding your tweets. What are you doing with them? Responding to some? Following everyone you can (and hoping they’ll follow you back)? Perhaps you’re just scanning for buzz and hoping to create a little with a few choice tweets of your own.

Why not publish some of the tweets back out to the web? We have local taco shops in Austin that get 15-20 tweets per week with people raving about their food, telling everyone to go check them out. Think about that: 15-20 testimonials a week. Why not put that on your website? In the case of most of these little taco shops, it’s a lot stronger marketing message than the boring 1-page website they’re showing. Now take that and scale it up to the buzz that a major brand, product, or entertainment company can generate. Why not bottle it up and get it back out there?

TweetRiver provides a powerful moderation platform for publishing tweet streams. We can help you weed out the spam, filter out the profanity or off-color comments, and help keep things on topic. And you’re not limited to one stream; you can create topical streams for your home page, product pages, community sites, and conference events.

3. Keep things secure.

Businesses care about security.  Balancing this need to be safe with the desire to engage customer through a medium that promotes complete transparency can be challenging. TweetRiver understands these requirements. We’ve built a suite of security features to help protect your business and internal users on Twitter. We know those legal guys are concerned.  Don’t worry.  We can help.

We support multiple roles, permissions sets, access to individual streams, and user groups. We also allow you to control who can tweet on the company’s behalf and whether of not they need a secondary approval before the tweet goes out. And once the tweets do get out, we keep an audit log of all messages. We can go back to any point in time and tell who tweeted what for your company.

4. A place for every tweet and every tweet in its place.

If you’re taking our advice on Point #1, you’re going to be looking at a lot more tweets. Navigating one giant timeline or search list of tweets is not the most efficient workflow. Categorization and automatic routing are a must; you want to easily differentiate customers asking for help or complaining about a new product bug from kudos or praise.

This is done using rules in TweetRiver.  As each tweet is discovered, it is analyzed for dozens of different factors. Add rules to look for keywords and intelligently route the former tweets to your Support organization and the latter tweets to the Marketing department.

When you’re ready, move beyond keyword-based categorization to take advantage of TweetRiver’s tweet scoring capabilities.  Flesh out your scoring profile such that Twitter spam indicators route a low-scoring tweet to the Trash, and quality tweets from well-known authorities are placed in a Featured stream and auto-published to the web.

As this blog post might indicate, TweetRiver is one hundred percent focused on creating the absolute best Twitter web application for business. Every customer we’ve spoken with has tried other corporate Twitter tools and has found them, for one reason or another, lacking. If you’re not already a TweetRiver customer, and your business is itching to really engage with your customers via Twitter, now is the time to create your TweetRiver account.

Go now.  Try it free for 30 days.  You won’t be sorry.

Online Signup & Integrated Billing
Want to try TweetRiver without contacting us directly? Pick a service plan and get started right away with your free 30-day trial.

Tweet Search
All of the tweets from, to, and about your business are now full-text searchable.

Notes
Add arbitrary comments to a tweet for internal usage.

Stream Permissions
Don’t want your Customer Support rep bothered by tweets intended for your marketing department? Limit the set of topical Twitter streams to only those that are relevant for each TweetRiver user.

User Groups
Capture common user settings (stream permissions, default Twitter account, TweetRiver administrative privileges) as a named group.  Add users to groups to quickly get your colleagues up and running inside TweetRiver.

We’ve got more exciting product features coming soon, but these should get you started. Go give them a whirl!

A blog gives people a chance to know you, how you think, and find out the quirks that you make you interesting. That’s why we’ve started writing: to give better insights about us, about the things we think about, and what makes us interesting.

The idea for TweetRiver came from watching the Obama campaign and the Skittles/Twitter debacle. We saw that some organizations and brands were using Twitter for more than just sending out messages, like letting people interact around their brand. Of course, the tools to do this effectively weren’t in place and people took advantage of the situation. And then we started TweetRiver.

TweetRiver lets organizations harness the conversations that are taking place on Twitter about a brand, product, or event. We aggregate the tweets about a specified topic and filter out the noise to create a clean, relevant stream that can be embedded in a web page, blog, or wherever it’s needed.

Our tools also allow you to join the conversation you’re hosting. We have authoring controls that make it easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts, grant employees access to different employees, and keep a record of who tweeted what on behalf of your company. Our goal is to make Twitter operational for businesses.

Companies are just now starting to get on Twitter and we expected the thought of using content from Twitter on a website to be pretty foreign, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised. Organizations are approaching us hungry for what TweetRiver will let them do. It’s an understatement to say the response has been great and has us very excited for what we’re going to do over the next few years.