BtoBonline, a great resource for BtoB marketers, recently ran an article on Twitter tools for teams. These are applications that go beyond Tweetdeck and Twhirl and in addition to allowing you to update multiple accounts, give you the power to deal with Tweets at the organizational level. One example could be to take a Tweet asking a support question and help you assign a task and resource to act on this, allowing you to monitor how such Tweets are handled.

I’ve only had personal experience with CoTweet which works particularly well for our small marketing team:

The one thing the BtoB article provides is an excellent feature-set to consider when looking at these tools:

Multi-account support: The ability to log into and manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single application or tool

Multi-user support: Putting the team into ‘team tools’, multi-user support lets multiple tweeters work in the same environment and, if necessary, be individually identified

Statistics: Once you start pumping multiple Twitter streams, lists and contributors through a single app, the available statistics and metrics to mine begin to get interesting

Scheduled Tweets: When managing multiple accounts, at times it’s easier to batch social media work, then send it out to the world over time

List management: If you are a managing multiple accounts while trying to track different communities of interest via Twitter lists, good list management creation and tracking features are a must

So there you have it. A simple wish-list when it comes to using a team to monitor a Twitter account.

If you’re using Twitter for business purposes you’ve probably already realized some of the shortcomings of most Twitter tools:

• Managing multiple accounts can be tricky
• Having multiple authors for a single channel can cause confusion and duplication
• Dealing with actionable Tweets
• Creating groups and categories for incoming Tweets

Whilst there are tools that let you perform some of these functions (Tweetdeck and Twhirl spring to mind), few cover all these features. Until now, that is.

CoTweet is a powerful corporate Twittering tool used by the likes of BestBuy, JetBlue and Ford, that helps manage and process your Tweets. I’m afraid it’s still in private beta (I’m afraid I’m only speaking from what I’ve read: I haven’t tried it out yet).

News highlights

Four business uses for Twitter | 26 Mar 2009 | ComputerWeekly.com
Gartner’s classification on micro-blogging uses: marketing tool, building reputations, sharing experience, information gathering.

How has PR changed over the last 10 years? Social Media PR Blog takes a stab at a top ten list
The way PR professionals conduct their business has changed drastically over the last 10 years. Video, corporate blogs and SEO were all practically non-existent at the end of the last century.

The state of digital marketing in Asia (Market-interactive.com)
“Despite the hype on mobile and social media, marketers in Asia will focus on corporate websites, email campaigns , search engine optimization and behavioural targeting as the key digital marketing strategies in the coming year, according to results from an annual digital survey.”
Is this particular to Asia or applicable to other markets too?

Free Social Media Monitoring Tools (Take Me To Your Leader)
A great list of the top tools for measuring social networks: from blogs to forums to Twitter.

Blogging rediscovered (The Korea Herald)
An interesting article covering the history and current state of blogging in Korea. Interesting cultural differences, such as the prominent position of meta-blog services that “interconnect individual blog sites in different portal services, leading to greater traffic and Web exposure”

8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams (Social Media Today)
If you need to measure your influence on Twitter, or know how many times one of your links has been clicked on, check out these tools.

Blogging and Reputation Tracking (Podcasting News)
Coverage of SXSWi experts talk about corporate blogging: monitoring conversations, keeping content fresh and the relative merits of having a multi-author blog.

The Future of Twitter: Social CRM and brand monitoring (Jeremiah Owyang)
Can Twitter make money by helping brands decipher the conversations taking place in the Twitter space? This post generated a lot of interest and debate.

The semantic web, and what it means for marketers (ReadWriteWeb)
Corporate blogger John Cass goes into detail on what Web3.0 will mean for us: “the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines.” Is this a further step towards the semantic web?

Corporate Blogs Spring Up, But Effectiveness Questions Remain (CNN)
“He sees it as an excellent means of direct communication with both interested media who tap into the blog and many non-journos who get the information directly from him without the filter of established news outlets,” Dee Allen, spokesperson for GM talking about star FastLane blogger Bob Lutz

Attracting more authors for your corporate blogs (Leading Virtually)
Create a culture that supports blogging, reward blogging efforts and show success are just some of the tips in this timely article. For companies that have blogs, maintaining them is the big issue.

Less than 5% of blogs are a result of direct corporate social strategy (Moneyweb)
There’s some great stats here on the size of the blogosphere and the market penetration.

Three secrets to simplicity (Boagworld)
Bottom line: think about what you can take away from your design, rather than always looking for new things to add.

CoverItLive: live blogging platform
I’m still trying to work out where the real value-add is in this, but there’s definitely a lot of features rolled into this tool.

Ustream: live video blogging as featured on @boagworld
If you are looking to make your blog more interactive, check out UStream – a great service for getting out a live version and recording of your show.

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