Greg Cieslik's blog

I recently wrote a blog post about the "Bob Dylan Twitter Pulse Monitor" which I created - check that post for the details. Anyway, I framed my project around "Bob Dylan" as the test subject because I'm a huge fan of his and it was fun for me to see the results come in. So, after working for a week or so trying to promote my widget, another awesome use case dawned on me:

With this one, simple widget you can monitor your Twitter Marketing campaigns.

Let's say you're trying to drive traffic to a specific URL on twitter. You've got your URL tracking link all set up (see: bit.ly.) You've hopefully got some followers retweeting you. You're going after a pretty strong keyword (how about, socialmedia.)

How do you know if your campaign is trending at the moment on twitter? Well, you can use the widget I created. Just plug your keyword in, check the results, and see where you fall in the hierarchy. If you're near the top of the list, you know that your URL is being retweeted heavily across the Twitterverse in association with your keyword. You can check the widget daily to check on its progress (the widget tracks a 24-hour time period.)

This is, in my opinion, social media monitoring broken down to its most basical level:

• You've identified a keyword you're going after
• You have some subject matter related to this keyword you're trying to promote (a URL)
• You have the ability to quickly, easily, and monitor if your URL is trending for your keyword FOR FREE.
• You don't even need to embed the widget on a website. Save the Source Code to an HTML file on your desktop, open with your browser - presto!

Useful, or am I just crazy? Let me know!

(As a final note, props to Bill Rice here at Kaleidico for encouraging the "No More Jobs At Kaleidico" project, which inspired all of this out of the box thinking!) 

Oh yeah - you should also check out our Eavesdropper Competitive Intelligence package. If you like what we do for free, you're gonna love what we charge for :-)

Since there have been "No More Jobs at Kaleidico" I've been tossing around a few ideas. Today I present to you a simple, customizable, embedable Twitter Widget: The 'Bob Dylan' Pulse Monitor (URLs open in new window - feel free to click:)

 This widget is searching for the term "bobdylan" (twitter friendly style)

This widget is searching for the term "happyincle" - because that's what I am!

This widget is monitoring twitter for the term "Bob Dylan" (of whom I'm a big fan - if you are too be sure to check out The Never Ending Pool and Expecting Rain!) It's taking a look at the past 24 hours and is paying strict attention to drowning out irrelevent "twitter noise" - that is, comments about Bob Dylan that are "one offs" and can be found using a simple Twitter Search. Rather, this widget looks for the most referenced URLs on Twitter within a 24-hour time frame.

Reusable, Customizable

Even if you're not a Bob Dylan fan, the great thing about this widget is how easy it can be made to monitor any term you want. For example, there's a twitter movement for Cleveland folks known as happyinCLE. If I were blogging about Cleveland regularly, I would embed this widget and change the search term to 'happyinCLE.' Again, because the widget is drowing out the noise your results will be what most users are talking about (ie, RT a URL about an article.)

All you need is one line of code pasted onto your website:

<div style="background-color:#f7f7f7; border-top:1px solid #6AB6DD; margin:0; padding:2px 10px; font:9px Arial, sans-serif; width:300px; height:600px;">
<iframe src='http://revision.icosales.com/TodaysTwitterTrend/twitterMentionCount.php?term="happyinCLE"' width=100% height=100% frameborder=0 scrolling=auto></iframe>
<a style="text-decoration:none; color:#333;" href="http://www.kaleidico.com/">Social Media Software &copy; Kaleidico</a></div>

You can use this iFrame anywhere, anysize you want. You can also easily adjust the search term just by changing the "term" variable at the end of the URL: creating a very easy and flexible widget for all of your webspaces. (My PHP script handles all character encoding.) This widget auto-updates every 5 minutes, scanning for any new references and reprioritizing items.

Future Iterations

This is just my first interation and there are a few things I'd like to change: mostly focusing on improved performance and layout. Ideally, I'd like to create a simple page allowing users to "skin" the widget and auto-generate the code to copy/past onto their website. I'm open to style suggestions - I'm not much of a graphics guy, heh.

However, I am pleased with this iteration because of the quality of the data. Looking only at the past 24 hours and picking out and prioritizing only the most referenced URLs on Twitter for your search term, I think this widget can show some pretty cool and ultimately more relevent information than a simple twitter search.

For example, you may notice at the time of this blog post my term is pulling in a good number of Japanese links: this is because Bob Dylan is currently in Japan on tour. So, rather than pulling in the latest mention of "Bob Dylan," the widget is prioritizing the Japanese links because those are being referenced most. Personally, I think it's interesting to see what his Japanese fans are sharing about him on Twitter before/after they attend his (amazing) concerts.

What do you think?

So - tell me what you think! Am I on an interesting path? Is this something you might add to a sidebar in your blog - or maybe this is something you'd like to see as a Google Gadget? What features would you want to get you using it today? I'd love to hear your thoughts!