Tweets or coverage?

You have to love Twitter. I’ve been playing around with it for the past few months for a campaign analysis tool.

Traditionally I’ve used services such as Press Index, Durrants and Romeike. I’ve also banged my head against a desk when a client used NMI – an awful press tracker that only monitored a third of the key titles that they wanted coverage in (but they wouldn’t change).

But there has been something missing in the traditional monitoring services. What’s the effect of having individual items of coverage. Does anyone, outside of the sites paid by advertisers to fill space, actually want to talk about the technology?

So, enter Twitter, like Technorati, is proving a nice way of cheking this. A good example is a one off pitch that I did yesterday to Pocket-Lint. A nice story and nice piece of technology that has already had over 120 tweets and 100 google results.

There are a handful of companies starting to do social media monitoring and do it well. The best I’ve seen is Montage, a Bristol based company that is also running PRBristol, a blog for the South West media. Definitely worth checking out.