Social Networking Notes, Issue 3

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

If you plan to make any serious use of Twitter for business purposes you're probably always on the look out for a better way to manage your presence. It's not that the likes of Tweet deck or whatever you currently use aren't great, it's just that the whole world of social media is so new we have no idea what's the best tool for the job.

Facebook, Twitter becoming business tools, but CIOs remain wary

One area where there's been no choice until recently is the facility for multiple users to effectively share a single Twitter account; what you might call "collaborative tweeting".

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If you plan to make any serious use of Twitter for business purposes you're probably always on the look out for a better way to manage your presence. It's not that the likes of Tweet deck or whatever you currently use aren't great, it's just that the whole world of social media is so new we have no idea what's the best tool for the job.

Facebook, Twitter becoming business tools, but CIOs remain wary

One area where there's been no choice until recently is the facility for multiple users to effectively share a single Twitter account; what you might call "collaborative tweeting".

A new online service, TweetFunnel published by Cloud10Apps, delivers just that with a number of features that support multiuser tweeting wrapped in a simple, managed publishing system.

Currently in free beta, TweetFunnel allows you to set up an account for one or more Twitter IDs and then assign multiple publishers and multiple contributors. Publisher's tweets can be sent immediately, held, or scheduled for a later date and time while tweets generated by contributors have to be approved by a publisher before being published or scheduled.

All users defined in TweetFunnel can be assigned cotags, a convention "for using signatures when tweeting from a brand account."

Cotags consist of a carat character followed by the person's initials or other identifying set of characters. As the Cotag site explains: "The concept is like #hashtags. But while #hashtags provide a way to track tweets topically across many users, ^CoTags create a way to associate individual tweets within a shared brand account. And in the process, ^CoTags bring 'humanness' to otherwise monolithic branded Twitter accounts."

Tweets can be submitted through the TweetFunnel interface or by SMS or e-mail. As every TweetFunnel account user's e-mail address and telephone number has to be registered, the service knows whether the tweet is from a contributor and needs to be held for approval. Currently the entire body of the e-mail message is tweeted so signatures and other additions must be suppressed … it would be a good idea if TweetFunnel allowed some kind of markup to define the tweet contents, for example, "[tweet this]".

TweetFunnel will also generate alerts via e-mail and SMS on other people's tweets that contain specific search terms of interest to you. Searches can also employ modifiers such as "network world OR nww".

Users can flag themselves through the service as "on duty" and (this is a great idea) that flag can be used to enable the routing of alerts so that alerting of off-duty collaborators is omitted.

This is great! TweetFunnel is the first service I've found that adds workflow to managing a corporate social networking presence. The service's features are well thought out and effective and the user interface and experience designs are sound. Altogether TweetFunnel is excellent and well worth considering as part of your corporate or brand Twitter strategy. (Read more on Twitter in the second part of this series.)

Read more about software in Network World's Software section.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.