Briefs

By Enid Burns, ClickZ, Mar 5, 2009

Twitter has become a powerful tool for brands to get messaging to consumers, but also to monitor conversation. Omniture today plans to introduce a tool to monitor conversations related to a brand or particular topic on the micro-blogging platform.

Through its API, Omniture is making it possible for customers to measure brand activity on Twitter through SiteCatalyst, its main platform. The program counts the number of times a brand is mentioned and presents it in a bar graph that can be sorted by day. The tool classifies Twitter users into segments, such as customers, vendors, employees, and other categories.

"These tweets are nothing more than text comments that we could incorporate in our suite platform," said Adam Greco, director of solution architecture in the Omniture Consulting group.

Greco himself uses Twitter. "After using Twitter a lot I realized it takes an enormous amount of time to monitor your brand," he said.

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Omniture isn't the first to market to measure Twitter. Competitive products include Trendrr, which tracks brands, topics, and engagement. Customers can blend in Trendrr data from Quantcast, Hitwise, and other data services, and schedule alerts if a brand or topic reaches a certain level of chatter.

Additional standalone Twitter metrics sources include Twitstat, TweetVolume, TweetScan, and Twitter's own analytics offering. Omniture sees its advantage being its integration with SiteCatalyst and its other products. In the future, offerings could include suggested search keywords based on words associated with tweets regarding brands. Greco said additional analysis through its segmentation tool is also being explored; however it's still early to determine the potential. "We're digging into that right now."

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