@dvocable

Often we have to go for live blogging/tweeting at events and functions and manage the client Twitter accounts and we need to show our clients a sample of what we plan to do in a simple sheet that we usually called the Tweet Sheet. I have seen various styles of this one and I thought I should create one that might just answer most client questions.

Check it out. Thoughts welcome.

Tweet Sheet Template

I have seen web design companies and online marketing agencies coming out with their online properties geared towards mass usage. So why shouldn’t a PR agency? So now Waggener Edstrom has come out with twendz, an online tool that you can use to find out the tone of the tweets around yourself, your brands, or a topic.

I ran my username on twendz and it brought up the latest RTs and replies to me on Twitter and summarized that 11% of my conversations are likely negative, while 59% are positive and 30% are neutral.

How did twendz come up with this? According to its site, ‘twendz uses a keyword-based approach to score tweets. Meaningful words in each tweet are compared against a ‘dictionary’ of thousands of words that are associated with positive or negative sentiment; each word receives a score that, when combined with the other scored words, allows twendz to make an educated guess at the overall tone of a tweet. After twendz scores a handful of tweets matching certain criteria, it extracts key terms, assigns a tone rating to each of those, and assembles them in a word cloud.’

Sounds good. My only concern is if twendz can figure out the context in which a particular word has been used. For example, ‘spam = negative’ might be questionable when I received a reply about somebody else like ‘Mr. Toby spams’. I mean I’m not the one talked about negatively here.

This aside, the tool looks promising (it’s still in beta) and something one can used to quickly see how people are talking about a brand or topic on Twitter. Check up your client on it.

If Indian Twitter users were finding their twittering habits a bit heavy on their pockets, if they use their mobile phones to update Twitter on a UK number, may be this new service will bring in a cheer.

Enter Snockles, the Indian copy of Twitter, complete with an Indian number to send updates to. So does it saves the use the cost of sending international SMS, it’s a wait and watch. According to the Snockles Settings page, its says ‘Premium short code rates apply for sending/ receiving Snockles via SMS’. What does the premium rates mean need to be seen. Snockles also has a UK number for UK users. Users in Europe can use this UK number for using Snockles.

So how will Snockles fare? Globally, the micro blogging service is already crowded with Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce. The Indian Twitter users must have already developed fairly large networks of friends and they are unlikely to change to Snockles just because it is an Indian service.

On the improvement front, Snockles can do with an integration of IM tools i.e. the ability to send updates from Google chat, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc. Some other innovative features need to be there as well to crack the global market.

Nothing new for the hard core micro-blogger. But for those who are starting to take interest on the social media scene in India, Snockles might score over the other global players, primarily due to its cost advantage (SMS) factor.

Snockles is from Web Spiders, a Kollkata based Rich Internet Application (RIA) development services and Systems Integration services.