There are a ton of social media monitoring tools out there, from the enterprise class tools, including Radian 6, Alterian and Scoutlabs to consumer-focused apps, including one I'd long relied on, TweetBeep, which would send me alerts by e-mail when keywords flowed through Twitter. But TweetBeep first became unreliable, and then practically disappeared, as e-mails from the service unexpectedly came to a stop about six weeks ago. In its place, I've turned to a newer product, in beta, called SocialPing, which sends me daily summaries of tracked terms, graphs them over time, and can even alert me in near real-time if I request it.

SocialPing bills itself as "serious Twitter monitoring, for serious people and serious companies", and it does a very good job, providing both real-time reports or nightly summaries by e-mail that populate my in box around midnight.


If you have gained access to SocialPing, you can start by telling the service what keywords to follow. This is done through tags. Tell it to watch for specific term or phrase, and whether you want to be notified instantly by e-mail, in a daily digest, or by Twitter DM or SMS. The product promises to soon track keywords on a destination URL, to track links to a specific Web site, or even tracking a specific URL. Essentially, if it's in text and it's on Twitter, SocialPing can find it.


Once you're set with a keyword or several, the data will begin to populate your dashboard. The dashboard shows the number of tweets that matched your keyword in the last 24 hours, and how many potential followers they may have reached. You can see spikes and lows corresponding with the time of those tweets, and can dive deep into the graph to see what the specific tweets said.


Since turning on SocialPing on April 1st, the product has kept all historical data, meaning I now have 5 weeks worth of graphs to see if words I am tracking are rising or falling, and can see if the mentions are primarily new tweets or retweets, and if that percentage is changing over time.

SocialPing also summarizes the activity to show the top users who have mentioned your keyword, sorted by follower count or by the total number of mentions. These reports are consistent both on the Web site and in the nightly e-mails.

With TweetBeep fading away for me, SocialPing has more than picked up the slack. It may not run deep queries or gauge sentiment analysis, as enterprise class systems do, but it is very solid. I recommend getting into their private beta and setting up a few queries yourself if you think that would be useful. Unsurprisingly, you can track them down at http://www.socialping.com or at @socialping on Twitter. No sign of the company focusing on additional networks any time soon, and it's unclear when they'll open for business from all, so get in early if you want access.

Regardless of where you sit in the RSS vs. Twitter debate for information discovery, you know the power of finding out when people are discussing topics of your interest, wherever they do so - be it on blogs, blog comments, social networks or anywhere else. With the advent of new Twitter lists, smart folks are manually curating lists of fellow Twitter users who to them provide value. And if done well, the lists should be spam-free, delivering only quality. A new service called Listiti debuted today, to help monitor lists which you hand select for keywords of your choosing.

Today, I use TweetBeep to get alerted to mentions on Twitter, be it for vanity searches or for topics I find interesting. But TweetBeep scours all of Twitter, not differentiating between what is a good hit and what is a less valuable one. Listiti can, in contrast, search only a specific subset of Twitter users to find relevant data, and send it to your e-mail.


Setting up an Alert in Listiti
For example, I have set up a pair of Twitter lists that are interesting to me. One is "myfavoritegeeks" for real-world techies I've grown to know well, and the second is "toptechbloggers" which is a hand-selected list of people whose content I trust. I can use Listiti to watch this list for any time they mention pet projects I am interested in, such as "Pubsubhubbub", and get an e-mail immediately.


Acknowledging the Alert Has Been Set Up
So far, the alerts are not yet "real time", but they are set up to run hourly, so you will get an update containing all positive hits in the last hour. They promise digest modes are coming. This makes another great use for Twitter lists as a trusted source, whether you set up the list yourself or go to a friend of yours with good taste.

Two of the most valuable tools I have been championing over the last several months are BackType and TweetBeep. The first searches through all comments around the Web for keywords you define, while the second watches Twitter search and delivers results to your e-mail. In tandem, the pair can essentially run on auto-pilot, giving you a real-time look into what the world is saying about you, your company, or your product.

Today, BackType extended its service to let you monitor Twitter, searching for links on Twitter that contain keywords you define. Like with its core service, and with TweetBeep, the new BackTweets Alerts system will pass on mentions from within Twitter to your e-mail, as quickly as you like, from immediate, to daily or once a week.

As I told John McCrea from Plaxo when I met him for Social Web TV last week, TweetBeep has made it so I don’t have to sit in TweetDeck all day and monitor keywords. Similarly, BackType doesn’t have me chasing through comments and reading every post, but I don’t miss much because I let these strong search tools do the work. (That's also a big part of why I said there is no information overload)

Will BackTweets Alerts be so good that I can do away with TweetBeep and turn to BackType for everything? I'm going to sign up and find out.

Darn it Twitter. How can a company with so much potential and so much perceived momentum seem like they just are asleep at the switch? After this week's visible discussion where we clearly outlined how your real-time search database is so broken that it barely has any value past the last 48 hours, you had to go ahead and break the real-time aspect of it as well - doing so on a long Memorial Day weekend when it seems nobody is around to hit the big shiny red button to turn the blasted thing back on.

Yes, your base product is working. I can Tweet. It can get to people. But your Twitter Search product is completely on pause - and has been all evening. Forget about using Twitter during an emergency or an earthquake, or even to see other people's top trending hashtags. The ones you have listed now are themselves six hours old. The Lakers' NBA game is still in the second quarter, according to you, even though ESPN tells me they won hours ago.


Go Lakers! No, wait. You're saying the game already ended?
It's getting to the point I even feel guilty pointing it out - considering how often you get hit for database inconsistencies, odd behavior and downtime. But all that goodwill that had built up as you were at the tip of the spear of a phenomenon many are calling the real-time Web is just wasting away - even as you take down your partner infrastructure, like TweetBeep, TweetDeck and Twazzup down with you.


So, is the Twitter Search team on holiday?
It's like I asked you at 11 tonight, @ev, @biz and @al3x, "if there is a box I can reboot, just tell me where to go." On behalf of your growing, and in theory, loyal, user base, I will do this, because it's the right thing to do. I just wish you guys were more on top of it, and could at least tell us what is going on - and how much more fail we should expect.

I don't want to care this much. I want your product to just work the way it is supposed to work so we can benefit from it and so you can find a way to make money. But right now, you're making real time look like a joke.

The concept of a workweek starting at 8 a.m. on Monday and concluding at 5 p.m. the following Friday is cute, but not all that realistic in most cases. Whether you're in sales or engineering, marketing or technical support, there seem to always be tasks that need your attention outside of the listed business week in the company handbook. With the rise of the Web and realtime response and discussion across social networks, managing a brand's reputation is absolutely a 24 by 7 operation. Sometimes, as a groundswell takes on your company, or your products, waiting until Monday to react is simply not an option, for the damage will already have been done.

Today's victim is the pain reliever Motrin, who posted a condescending ad that had many parents seeing red. The ad, posted on their main Web site, essentially stated that carrying one's baby in a sling or backpack would cause undue pain, requiring their product. While delivering a need and solution makes sense, they unnecessarily mocked babywearing as being in fashion, and making you appear like a real mom. The condescending ad ignored the reality of needing to go "hands-free" simply to function, fashion be darned. As a father of twins, I may not be a mom, but I often carry one of the kids around in a sling or a baby carrier, whether to do dishes, or just to type without having to go one-handed. And Motrin's ad was misguided. After my wife viewed it, she said she was surprised the ad got through a series of reviews and passed.

(See the video archived on YouTube)

While not incensed as many mothers said they were, and in a household that didn't have Motrin in the medicine cabinet anyway, we discovered the ad through the power of Twitter, which was ablaze with mommybloggers slamming the campaign. (See: #motrinmoms)

On a weekend not dominated by major news, Motrin's brand got stomped on, and waiting around until Monday to pick up the pieces would be too late. After almost a day of getting dissed, the Web site finally went down tonight, either through exceeded demand, or by way of the company's intervention.

When I talk to brand managers about social media, I recommend three clear steps:

1. Understand
2. Observe
3. Act

They need to understand that your brand is at the mercy of its constituents. And you need to be using monitoring tools to rapidly discover and act upon how it is being used or mentioned - no matter what day it is.

Some basics to get started:

• Twitter Search - to see realtime mentions of your brand or keywords.
• TweetBeep - sending alerts of keywords or your brand to e-mail.
• BackType Alerts - to see whenever your brand is mentioned in comments around the Web.
• Google News search - alerts to e-mail for your brand.
• Google Blog search - alerts to e-mail for your brand in blogs.

These alerts will be automatically sent to you around the clock, even if the doors to your office are closed and the lights are off. Be aware of these services, monitor what is being said, and after all this, act. Don't just react, but do so thoughtfully.

And if you were curious to see just how I look wearing a baby carrier, check out the photo on FriendFeed.

See also:
Marketing Mystic: In Motrin moms debacle, the winner is Twitter
The Standard: Motrin learns there's a downside to viral advertising

On yesterday's micromedia panel here at the Blog World Expo, I said the way that companies can start using microblogging tools is to first be aware of them, and second to monitor them, before jumping in deep with both feet. The idea would be to understand the nature of the community, and to see how your business or industry is being perceived on the service before sending off tweet after tweet. As one of the best tools to follow your company's mentions online is to use Google's News Alerts or Google Blog Search and have them delivered by e-mail, TweetBeep intends to do the same thing - following terms you specify and sending them to your e-mail, either by the hour or by the day.

Using TweetBeep, as you would expect, is fairly simple. Sign up for an account with TweetBeep, and then add alerts, by hour or by day, register your e-mail address, and you will get notified by e-mail when your search terms come up.


Adding a new alert for #bwe (Blog World Expo)


My active TweetBeep alert list
You might be wondering why you would use TweetBeep instead of Twitter Search (formerly Summize), but relying on TweetBeep takes the manual intervention out of it. Instead of searching yourself, the alerts are automatically delivered. And for an enterprise corporate setting, e-mail is easily understood.


TweetBeep delivers results via e-mail
While TweetBeep isn't new, having launched back in May with Orli Yakuel on Go2Web20, there's no doubt this tool is being under-utilized, relative to other alert tools. So if you want to keep track of what's being said about you or your company in the Twitterverse, set up an account and get started. It just might be a tool you can use to get your boss to understand how the microblogging community is thinking about your product in real time.