or this

You haven’t had your account “hacked”, but I bet you have recently tried that latest free tool to show you how many people followed you recently etc and provided it with access to your twitter account.

To stop you looking silly, here is what you do in 3 easy steps to revoke Twitter authorisation to applications to tweet on your behalf.

Step 1

On Twitter.com, click the dropdown under your name on the RHS of the page and select “Settings” (click for larger view)

Step 2

On the next menu select “Applications”  (click for larger view)

Step 3

Click the “Revoke Access” button for each and EVERY application that is not essential.  The latest ones there are most probably the ones sending DMs on your behalf.  In my example below this is not the case though. (click for larger view)

Step 4

Use a paid for and responsible tool such as @PeopleBrowsr (free 7 day trial) to manage your twitter presence.

Remember if the product is free, then the product is me (and thus your reputation online).

Don’t look silly, de-authorise spammy apps NOW!

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Quoting from Tim’s article

According to three people familiar with the situation, Twitter’s plans under consideration would see “promoted tweets” appear in their main timeline, the main focus of the Twitter website. Twitter had tested such ads with a third-party mobile client, HootSuite.

Users could also see tweets from a brand they follow appear high up in their stream even though they were posted hours previously.

In many ways this is not new.  Twitter has been promoting a range of advertising products for some time now namely:

Promoted Tweets appearing as content in search results, not alongside them

Promoted Trends artificially promote a particular brand or keyword as a trend

Promoted Accounts are a paid for placement in the “who to follow” area

As many commentators have pointed out, Twitter’s ad revenue (rumoured to be around $100M in 2011) doesn’t compare that favourably to Facebook’s estimated $4Bn revenue number for 2011).

It’s a tough call for Twitter to generate significant ad revenue from a “conversation service” without really annoying their users.

Twitter has shied away from what may have seen an obvious route – that of banner ads or display ads on the site, but now 5 years in and millions of dollars later, they need to up the revenue from advertising.

Looking at Tim Bradshaw’s article in more detail (and I can only assume his scoop is correct because I am yet to see a retraction from Twitter), we can expect to see more aggressive placement of “promoted tweets” (read Twitter ads) in user’s timelines very soon.

Below is an example of a tame Starbucks promoted tweet – and I would expect the new forms of Twitter ads (because that’s what advertising agencies will call them) might look like.

Twitter’s dilemma – “social media advertising” is an oxymoron

You can’t buy space in a conversation – a great quote I saw from one of David Cushman’s talks (slide 14) and one that makes great sense.  It also points to the problem with trying to apply the same advertising buying metrics to social media.

To be clear you CANNOT ADVERTISE on social media in the same way as you can with TV, you need a different approach to buying “space” in a conversation (just as you can’t buy space in a conversation at the pub, or a conference, or anywhere for that matter).

And here lies Twitter’s greatest challenge.  If they insert promoted tweets in a user’s timeline, I am assuming that they will be selling them on a cost/per basis (whether this stays as cost per engagement, cost per mille etc we will soon see).

The problem they will face is that the advertising world is used to buying advertising in bulk (specific TARPs or GRP for TV, CPM for web etc) so an ad planner will say “I want my Twitter ad to appear to 50,000 Twitter users”

The poor old Twitter ad sales exec will explain that it is not so simple, and it needs to be relevant, must resonate and be able to be re-tweeted etc etc

A possible response from a non-social media savvy planner might just be “I want my Twitter ad to appear to 50,000 Twitter users”…… sigh.

Will Twitter chose the nuclear option?

Could Twitter bite the bullet and start to push promoted tweets (Twitter ads) in a big way to a wider audience than they are currently serving, to increase ad revenue and keep the VC’s and backers happy?

Whichever way they ramp up their advertising business, the one thing I really hope they are working on is an ad relevance engine.

You see, I am quite happy to see more promoted tweets in my timeline, even as a persistent “DickBar” style method AS LONG AS the tweets are RELEVANT.

This is a huge deal for me (and will probably also be for 1000’s of other Twitter users) and I really hope that Twitter uses my previous 13,000+ tweets as a way of ensuring that the ads I see are relevant.

What I don’t want Twitter to do is make the same mistakes that the mobile advertising industry made a few years ago, and tried to transplant banner ads from the web to the mobile.

Because the mobile is such a personal device (have a look at this video below from the 4:40 minute mark, when I asked an audience of 400 in Amsterdam in 2009 to swap their mobile with the person next to them.

What this exercise proved in 2009 (and still gets the same reaction in every city and country I speak at) is that the mobile is personal. We can transplant this mobile example for social media conversations and tweets. To interrupt a social media conversation in a non-relevant way (we call this broadcast advertising) would be classified as butting into a conversation.

Old advertising rules no longer apply

What I advise clients over and over again is that they can no longer simply take a TV campaign and retro-fit it to twitter.

You have to be much smarter at this, just as when you approach a group of people you have never met at a conference and hover, waiting for the right moment to inject your view into the conversation, you are waiting for the moment when you will be most relevant.

Getting the balance right

Twitter needs to get this balance right, and if they do they stand to make a lot of money.

Get it wrong and it is another color.com moment, where they will have to go back to the drawing board (and the investors) to keep the now very expensive (400+ staff and recent $50M TweetDeck acquisition) lights on.

Twitter’s Cannes trip is a step in the right direction

Looking at the tweets from Katie Jacobs Stanton (@katies), Twitter sent a sizeable team from San Francisco (as well as their new UK GM Tony Wang) to the Cannes Lions last week to schmoose ad agencies.

I had the pleasure of meeting Katie in person at the Twitter HQ recently, and know her to be a smart operator.  I guess that they spent a lot of time testing their new proposition with agencies and brands in Cannes to see if it would fly.

I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and I hope they figure out the ad model

I want twitter to figure this out , and I know they are capable of this because they are a smart bunch (flock), but they possibly need to ignore some of the feedback they received from their meetings in Cannes and instead go with their gut instincts and develop commercial communications (read relevant and wanted ads) that twitter users are willing to not only receive, but also click on and engage with.

Ad agencies are probably not the best people to advise on how to advertise on social media, because they are so used to the reach & frequency broadcast model we have been using for the last 50 years.

I will be watching this space closely, and I’m likely to come across some of those who were in Cannes and met with Twitter at the PeopleBrowsr UK launch party this week so perhaps I will hear first-hand if I am right or not.

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Recently I blogged on the use of SMS to report faulty traffic lights in London.

Over the past few days I have again chalked up another social media success story, with twitter winning out over traditional methods.

A few days ago I was walking home from running some errands when I saw a river of water gushing from the base of a tree – a major water leak.

I quickly whipped out my mobile and Googled report a water leak and bingo the first result gave me the number to call 0800 714 614.

So I called the number…and waited….and waited, and started to walk home while waiting.  I eventually gave up, so the leak went unreported.

Today I walked back by the same spot (a very busy part of Kensington) and to my amazement the leak was still flowing.

Either no-one else had reported it (hard to believe) or the crew had not had a chance to attend.

So I called the number stored in my dialled call list …and waited….and waited like the previous time – so I gave up.

I then thought to myself – I wonder if Thames Water are on Twitter?

A quick search showed that yes indeed @thameswater was not only on twitter but was actively responding to reports of other leaks and also providing updates on what leaks would be fixed that day.

Surprisingly the website that contained information about which number to call does mention their twitter presence (towards the bottom of the page), but is not mobile optimised so that when I was checking the number to call from my mobile, I missed the twitter reference because it was not obvious in the small window on my phone.

[ top tip for Thames Water ] – detect the user agent (to see if it is a mobile) and deliver them a mobile experience, with mobile friendly information – a click to call number and the twitter name clearly visible at the top of the (mobile optimised) page.

Mobile+social to the rescue

What happened next was a good example of mobile and social media in action. About 4 minutes after I had tweeted that there was a bust main (with the street address and postcode), I received this tweet in reply

I also had a brief exchange with Amy from the @thameswater #tweetaleak team suggesting that they promote their twitter presence more widely.

Walking home again this afternoon, this is what I saw – a crew hard at work fixing the leak! Success!

A quick video of the burst main and the crew at work is below

So using the old methods (call a call centre and wait) still don’t work for me.  As I have blogged previously, as I rule I generally do not call call centres, I tweet.

I will be adding Thames Water to my list of companies to tweet (and also show as a great case study at my next speaking engagement).

It shows the power of Twitter, and also how an asynchronous method of dealing with faults (and not having to wait on the phone paying 5p a minute to be a good Samaritan) is the future – if only everyone living near the leak were aware of this.

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Yammer is essentially a corporate version of twitter, which is completely private as you need to log in with your corporate email address to gain access and see the tweets.

I have been setting up practice Yammer accounts for customer service teams before they go live on twitter, and feeding them tweets collected via our social monitoring platform.  This way they get to see real tweets, and can take their time to respond, and in some cases this has allowed them to refine their internal response procedures before “go live”.

The response has been extremely encouraging, and has been providing the customer service teams with valuable experience and confidence before they go live on twitter.

In some cases, those people asked to also monitor and respond to social media channels have not had much experience with twitter (some do not even have a twitter account – well not before my training sessions anyway – I have a high twitter sign up rate in my sessions as I can be very persuasive!).

Yammer has been around for a while, but unless your company is blessed with a well read IT person, or marketing maven, they may not have introduced you to it you.

In fact in January this year I was at a Cap Gemini conference  in Paris, and instead of having a twitter wall, they had a Yammer wall.  As I was not able to access the CG internal email system, I could only watch but not contribute.

If you would like some ore detail on how I set up my corporate clients on Yammer for twitter practice, feel free to contact me or tweet me @andrewgrill

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I also wrote a piece about this 12 months ago.

Jonathan talks in his article for Ad Age titled simply “the twitter tax” of his epiphany after speaking to a colleague who had used twitter to complain about poor customer service.

“Tools like Twitter aren’t some dream of customer empowerment, but rather the nightmare reality of the broken relationships between consumers and brands. Responding to online complaints is a tax that companies pay because of the chronic mismatch between what consumers expect from brands and what they ultimately get. An individualized response might momentarily bridge the gap, but it won’t fix it. Never will.”

And here he has hit the nail on the head.

On a daily basis, clients I advise about social media are absolutely terrified about twitter, because it now allows 24 x 7 instant feedback about customer service issues.

Dave Evans puts it so eloquently

Marketing Sets expectations

Operations Delivers

Any gap between the two
drives a conversation on the web

Twitter is the best early warning system a CEO can have.   Until now, we have put massive barriers in the way of customers providing us with feedback with endless phone queues and mindless “your call is important to us…” messages, so many just don’t bother to respond the way that YOU want them to, so they don’t.

Instant response channels such as twitter allow consumers to complain at the very place and time when they receive bad service, even on their mobile.   The fact that they now can provide this feedback exposes the fact that many companies are not prepared to respond and action what is being said.

Indeed as part of a social media monitoring study to support a client pitch, I uncovered a raft of customer service issues being reported on twitter.   “We know about this” was the client’s response.   There was however no process internally to actually rectify any of these issues uncovered so I wondered to myself why they were so intent on listening – but not willing OR able to act on the feedback.

As Jonathan goes on to point out (emphasis is mine)

“When you promote your online social monitoring you’re agreeing to pay the tax for the failures of your company’s operators to do their jobs. This means you’re not doing yours, either. Customer service starts and ends in operations, not marketing, and innovation is not regularly your customers’ friend.”

Lucy’s article in a recent edition of the Financial Times put Twitter on the front page (literally).  Her piece titled “Twitter is no way to manage a smelly mess” (article behind a paywall) was prompted by a tweet from Armando Iannucci (aka @aiannucci, the comedy writer behind The Thick of It) about a recent trip to Starbucks.

“Still surprised that, despite their market dominance, Starbucks haven’t eliminated the slight smell of lavatory you get as you enter.”

The Starbucks UK MD, Darcy Willson-Rymer who responded directly to Armando also rated a mention in the piece as he tried to appease him via twitter.  Lucy’s view in the article was that if an MD has to read and manage their twitter feed personally then perhaps this is not the best use of his time.   She also suggested that The Starbucks MD should not have been relying on twitter to have this problem reported, because there should have been procedures in place to manage these sorts of issues without the MD even becoming involved.

So what does this all mean for your business?

Both Jonathan and Lucy have highlighted an interesting new trend for consumers to complain via twitter and expect (and often receive) instant gratification due to the very public nature of the medium.

At conferences I promote my own preferred communications channel for BT and Vodafone being twitter.  I just can’t stand waiting in a phone queue.  The asynchronous nature of twitter lets me get on with my day while my service provider gets on with fixing the problem.

While companies need to respond via these new channels, they also need to work on the basics – and improve customer service to the point where there is no need to complain via any channel at all.

Companies that start to monitor social media channels for customer complaints should not react with alarm if a large number of issues are being reported via twitter, they should instead take this as a sign that there is a more fundamental problem with their customer service and operational areas and work on fixing those.  Twitter is fast becoming an “unofficial” channel that simply allows the bad news to flow much faster without the internal earmuffs being applied.

Social media is not the issue here.  Fix the basics and the bloggers won’t “go away” as many of you hope they will – but instead they will become online advocates for your brand.

In this new world, it will be peer advocacy and excellent customer service that drives sales – not just flashy ads and a “thanks for your feedback” tweet.  The twitter tax can actually be good for your business as it forces you to put things right and check you are constantly improving the service you provide your customers.

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The lovely Janaina Pilomia from Forum Nokia was kind enough to loan me a brand new Nokia N97 for blogging at the Mobile 2.0 Conference in Barcelona in June.

The device was put to good use, and is now looking for a new home.  Nokia are prepared to offer it to a mobile developer out there who could really use a Nokia N97 to test, finalise and demonstrate their Symbian application.

I’m going to ask for pitches from developers via twitter – so you will need to be able to convince me in less than 140 characters that you and your app are the most worthy of the N97.

Here are the rules, and my decision will be final

1. You must be located in the UK or the EU and be able to demonstrate you are developing a mobile application for Symbian Series 60 (we will need to verify you via your website etc)

2. You do NOT have a commercial solution yet and the N97 would really help you finalise and demo the application

3. The 5 best / most imaginative tweets sent to @andrewgrill AND tagged #lc (for London Calling) by Friday 7th August 2009 will be selected by me and from this one will be selected to receive the N97.  Your details will then be sent to Forum Nokia and they will follow up with you and arrange delivery of the N97.

Feel free to leave a comment below also with a link and description of your mobile application but please note I will be selecting the winner via twitter.

Get tweeting and good luck!

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IBM, in conjunction with their advertising Agency Ogilvy has served up three brilliant applications for the 2009 Wimbledon Championships. You can read more about the “Say Hello to a smarter Wimbledon” campaign, and my summary of each of them is below.

iPhone Wimbledon application

This is a must have application (just search for Wimbledon in the app store) for anyone following Wimbledon this year. It has live scores (updated every 30 seconds), match results, news, match draws, video and the match schedule.

I expect that the huge success of this application will mean that events such as the US Open and Australian Open (which IBM also support) will want to use a similar application to keep fans updated.

Indeed I understand that an Australian Open representative visited the IBM teams while at Wimbledon to see what they had created for the Championships.

If you can’t watch the final today live on the BBC – this is the next best thing!

IBM Seer Java application

For those without an iPhone, IBM developed a Java application that aggregates news and twitter feeds relevant to the Championships in the one application. If you are in the UK, Text ‘smart’ to 60999 to download the app. You can also go to m.wimbledon.org on your mobile if you just want the latest results.

Wimbledon is one of the first mainstream sporting events to really start to leverage the power of twitter. Both The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (AELTC) – the hosts of the game and IBM are running twitter feeds relevant to the event.

There is the main @Wimbledon feed as well as @centre_court (both run by the AELTC) providing live updates on what is happening on Centre Court, or in and around Wimbledon.

To really leverage the power of twitter, IBM went one further and engaged some of their own tennis mad Interns as Scouts who literally walk around the entire Wimbledon site reporting on things that matter to those at the Championships via twitter. You can see what sort of things they report on by following @IBMScout.

Over the 2 weeks of the championships, these Scouts have not only had their picture taken with the likes of Ben Stiller, but also notched up more than 3000 status updates!

They hashtag each tweet with a point of interest – as per the examples below

#Court2 Gangways 7-9 are best if you want group seating. 300+ seats now available for men’s invitation.

#court14 People leaving now after Serena finishes her practice on court 15. For live tennis check out courts 3 and 4.

#Court2 150+ seats still available on No.2 court, game still in 1st set. Seating is abundant at the back entrances (gangways 3-6)

The tags are then used in the IBM Seer Android application, explained below.

IBM Seer Android application

This is probably the most leading edge application I have seen come out of a large corporate like IBM for a long time – and in speaking to the IBM team, a refreshing risk that they took in pitching this to the AELTC.

In a nutshell, the IBM Seer android application utilises the GPS in the Android phone as well as the compass to not only understand where you are on the Wimbledon site, but also which way you are pointing. This type of emerging technology is called Augmented Reality (AR) and has started to appear with other applications such as Wikitude from Mobilizy and Layar from SPRXmobile. Nick from Ogilvy told me that the Wikitude application was the inspiration for the Seer Android app.

In the weeks leading up to the tournament, the IBM and Ogilvy teams tagged points of interest around the grounds (transport, gates, toilets, food outlets etc) so that when you look through the camera, these points of interest are superimposed on the picture (see the screenshot above).

The tweets mentioned above from the Scouts that are hashtagged are fed into the Android application – so live updates on what is happening in each area is available when you point the phone camera at an area of interest. This is a really amazing use of twitter – both for those with and without the AR application.

You can also watch a video of the application in action – and even Nick from Ogilvy (trying) to explain how it works to Aussie tennis legend, Pat Cash. As well, you can see some photos on Flickr from the IBM Scouts over the last few weeks, or photos I took during my visit to the site.

A HUGE thank you to Louise Fletcher (@louisef1) who was running the event PR for IBM, as well as Nick Bennett from Ogilvy (@nickbtweets) who was from the team behind the implementation of these apps from the creative side, and the “Scout leader” onsite to make sure everything went to plan. Ogilvy run IBM’s advertising in the UK and also do some amazing work with other large clients.

Thanks also to Alan Flack who is the IBM Client Executive for the AELTC account, and who was brave enough to pitch these ideas to his client. In return, the AELTC were open enough to new ideas to green light these initiatives.

Alan provided me with a ticket to watch the Men’s Doubles final at Centre Court after we met (something totally unexpected, but a very welcome gesture – thank you).

I also understand that Brendon Riley, the Chief Executive, IBM UK and Ireland (and a fellow Australian) provided high praise for all 3 applications when he hosted clients on the Saturday at the event.

I would certainly rate these initiatives as a huge success, and something that we can expect to see a lot more of not just at other tennis championships, but other large events. Now that the iPhone 3GS and Nokia N97, and E72 come with a compass, we can expect to see many more sporting event visitors using these applications to greatly enhance their experience.

Augmented Reality, coupled with live updates from roving “Scouts” via twitter is a perfect solution – well done IBM, Ogilvy and Wimbledon for having the vision to showcase the use of this mash up at such a public event as the Wimbledon Championships.

See all of the mobile services available for Wimbledon at the official website.

If you are using twitter in a business context as IBM are here, I would love to hear from you for my book on the business use of Twitter as I am looking for really interesting case studies. Please contact me via the contact page.

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Quoting from the story: 

Dell embraced social media in 2007, and set up their @DellOutlet account to advertise discounts on refurbished products.

It also publishes promotions exclusive to 600,000 Twitter followers.

Dell now has a string of accounts and 200 staff use the site to talk to customers.

“Since we started back in 2007, we’ve earned more than $2 million in revenue at @DellOutlet attributed directly to our Twitter activity,” Dell’s Stephanie Nelson blogged.

This figure is double what Dell made from the Twitter account six months ago.

Taking all the Twitter-related purchases together adds up to more than $3m in sales, Ms Nelson said.

When shoppers complained online that some keys were too close together on one laptop model, the company announced they would change the design of the keyboard.

I think we can expect to see many more stories like this in the future as brands embrace social media in the right way.

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Apparently the artwork was designed some years ago by Sydney designer Yiying Lu, and is titled “lifting up a dreamer”.

According to the article, twitter co-founder Biz Stone saw the graphic on iStock photo website and decided to use it for their “site down” message – and was not designed by twitter.

You can read more about this on the SMH website.

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His subject was “You could bring back the hula hoop if you found a way of connecting it to the net ”

In the piece, Richard suggests

“Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to answer (in 140 characters or fewer) the question: “What are you doing now?” Yesterday no one had heard of Twitter. Today half the world has signed on with Twitter. Tomorrow Twitter will be dead. Has anyone else noticed how fast we’re getting through our fads?

I hate giving advice to young people but when I was your age we’d make a good fad last at least six months. We got a whole year of fun out of totem tennis. We spun 10 months out of the yo-yo. Even speed reading lasted four months – which is pretty remarkable when you consider how quickly we got through the manual.

I’m as fad-hungry as the next spiritually empty materialist but the speed of uptake has become ridiculous. People hear there’s a new e-fad and realise with horror they are not part of it. Their face dissolves into something akin to The Scream by Edvard Munch. “Oh my God. I think I’m dying. Quick. How do I log on?”

And later

“Watching television news for nothing? Oh, how boring. Watching the same television news on your mobile phone, while sitting on the bus and being charged per second for the privilege? “Ohhh, ohhh, don’t stop, this is so amazing.” You could bring back the hula hoop if you found a way of connecting it to the net and a phone.”

I was a cynical as Richard back in 2007 when I first heard about twitter – then got the bug in 2008 and have not looked back.  I’ve gained REAL friends, business contacts, and even business leading to revenue via twitter.  Yes, I’m a strong believer in twitter and I am using it to its full potential.

Have a read of Richard’s article – let’s look at it again in September (+ 6 months) then March 2009 (+12 months) to see if he was right or not. As always, follow me on twitter as @andrewgrill and also subscribe to my RSS feed.

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This article was also published by Digital-Media magazine in Australia - you can also download a PDF.

Turning to twitter search for earthquake, I could see that yes many people were also reporting the same thing.  As at 10:17 GMT – still nothing on the mainstream media.  Read below to find out why twitter + mobile + search is the new killer app.

A few days ago while reading my twitter feed (on my mobile via dabr.co.uk) I came across a reference to an article in Ad Age that looks at how twitter views its search capability compared to Google search.

It comes on the heels of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google having to apologise after calling twitter a “poor man’s email system” recently.
Comparing twitter to email means that Eric just doesn’t get twitter. I’m going to hazard a guess that he probably does not even have a twitter account (@ericschmidt is a fake).

Going further, for a CEO so fixated on taking Google mobile, he misses the Eureka moment around twitter + mobile + search – which forms the subject of this short post.

The very fact that I came across the inspiration for this post via twitter on my mobile should give you a good indication of how I have started to consume news and information.

While twitter’s eternal question is “what are you doing”, as more and more people join the twitter revolution and use it via their mobile, the question is becoming “what are you doing and where are you doing it?”

Recent tragic global events have been reported, even broken via twitter – thanks to those eyewitnesses micro-blogging via their mobile.

Most recently we had the story of a mountain rescue co-ordinated by twitter, the Turkish airliner crash at Schipol airport broken by twitter 15 minutes ahead of major news outlets, and apparently even CNN picked up the news via twitter.  Sky news in the UK has also just employed a “twitter correspondent”.

Clearly – something is happening when major news outlets start turning to social media. The Ad Age article however highlights that twitter’s end game (and where the money may come from) is not just about trumping news outlets – it is about completely disrupting the Google business model of paid search.  Twitter can only do this however by tapping into the unique utility and immediacy of the mobile phone.

In each of the disasters reported above, the only way possible to report these was by mobile.  In each case the eyewitnesses did not have the luxury of their desktop PC or laptop connected to an internet connection – in each case they grabbed their mobile (because it is always with them) and started twittering what they saw – live and unfiltered to the entire world.

In 2008, twitter bought and integrated summize.com to become search.twitter.com – twitter’s search engine.  Until recently I didn’t think I had any real use to “search twitter” but these global news events have drawn me to it, allowing me to get a live stream of what is happening in the world – filtered not only by different subjects or themes, but also by real people.

And here’s the Eureka moment with twitter + mobile + search that should be worrying the heck out of Google, and probably prompted Eric Schmidt’s feeble attempt to hide what can only be described as his professional envy about a web2.0 service that is rising towards critical mass and adoption at a much faster rate than Google.

The way I personally use twitter is to carefully select who I follow, and actually block my updates – making them available only to those I’d like to follow me.  Many have challenged me as to why I have an “invitation only” model for followers – but it has allowed me to put a quality control filter on my twitter stream.

Twitter celebrities such as Stephen Fry cannot realistically manage a follower base of 200,000 people.  I follow around 1,000 people and in turn I have over 700 follow me that I have in a way hand-picked.  This means that I can keep out the spammers and scammers that have started to infiltrate twitter and instead concentrate on quality news and views from my followers.

This does mean that my twitter stream follows pretty closely what I am interested in – and therefore it was no surprise to receive the Google vs twitter piece from Ad Age via twitter.

This is where twitter search will start to win out over Google. We all know that many Google search results are either paid (adwords) or as part of search engine optimisation (SEO) undertaken to make the results appear on the first few pages of Google.  With twitter however (or at least at the moment) the information is being supplied by real people in real time.  Even the most powerful Google computers cannot keep up with real updates from real people.

Making these “tweets” searchable adds a new dimension to search, and in particular search via the mobile.

Perhaps going forward, a mobile user will turn to their twitter stream to search for a local restaurant recommendation, safe in the knowledge that the answer comes from a human who is familiar with the area, or has actually been to somewhere suitable, or is actually at the restaurant at that moment.

Google will have to pull something out of their not insignificant hat to keep up with mobile social networking, coupled with search.  While “local search” may be the holy grail, localised, personalised and user regulated search via the mobile could end up being the real winner. 

I can understand why the twitter VC’s have just recently pumped a further $35M into the company.  I am sure they can also see the value of social media search ahead of traditional advertising models such as banner ads splashed across the website. The next challenge will be how to monetise this unique form of search without alienating social media consumers.

You can request to follow me on twitter – I’m @andrewgrill

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While I was at Tuttle in London on Friday, I wasn’t there long enough to catch up with TweetDeck guru, Iain Dodsworth.

Lucky for us though,  our man inside - Christian Payne (@documentally) was there and he recorded this short interview below.

Talking With TweetDeck from Documentally on Vimeo.

Neville Hobson also talks on his blog about the utility of TweetDeck.

If you have more than a handful of twitter followers, you should seriously try out TweetDeck.  It is free, and runs on the Adobe AIR platform on Windows and Mac so you can have it open as a separate application.

I have been using TweetDeck for several months now and it just keeps getting better.  Iain has done a brilliant job with it and he listens closely to the feedback from his users.  It is simply a beautifully engineered piece of software that I use every day.

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