Social Media Spin

Quick! What are peo­ple say­ing right now about your brand? Impos­si­ble to know, you say? Nah, not at all. Enter Side­line, “a Twit­ter app that lets you mon­i­tor and search what peo­ple are say­ing about your prod­uct in real time”.

Last week, Yahoo released a real-​​time Twit­ter mon­i­tor­ing tool called Side­line. I’ve been play­ing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 mon­i­tor­ing tool, it does have some neat fea­tures your com­pany may find useful.

Trend­ing Top­ics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twit­ter are tweet­ing about today? Check out Sideline’s Trend­ing Top­ics screen. This is great for mon­i­tor­ing topic trend­ing related to a con­fer­ence, new prod­uct release, or any other much-​​talked-​​about sit­u­a­tion that affects your brand name.

Engage Cus­tomers Better

You can also cre­ate and group cus­tom queries by top­ics of inter­est. This allows you to cre­ate as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites but­ton, and you can reply directly from the Side­line inter­face to any tweet in your group.

Cus­tomer Atti­tudes Matter

My favorite fea­ture on Side­line is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twit­ter Search based on Words, Peo­ple, even Atti­tudes. Smart com­pa­nies pay atten­tion not only to men­tions of their brand on Twit­ter, but how peo­ple feel about it. A huge cred­i­bil­ity free-​​fall is when a com­pany auto-​​follows any men­tion of their brand with­out tak­ing the time to see if the tweet is bash­ing the prod­uct or prais­ing it. Granted, for some com­pa­nies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through men­tions to ascer­tain the atti­tude of the per­son toward the brand — but this Side­line fea­ture makes this very impor­tant job a lit­tle easier.

One more note about Side­line: It’s an open-​​source tool, so have your devel­op­ers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users look­ing for info from the Twit­ter pub­lic side­line. Def­i­nitely a tool worth tak­ing a look at.