As always, thank you for sifting out the chaff! I just sent this post as a link to a friend of mine who is jumping into Twitter.

We’ve been following Tim Bishop’s Ellensburg Downtown Association for several years now. Just do a search for “Ellensburg” in this blog and you’ll find several articles about their no less than heroic efforts to save one community’s downtown area.

Now, Timothy tells us that they’re in danger of losing state funding for their program. But, they’re rallying the troops and using social media to get the word out – and yes, you can help, even if you live in Tuscaloosa.

Here’s a link to their Facebook page “Supporting Main Street in Washington State” – http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=233019454367

It may take us a little time to write our next blog post about these guys, so log on now – join – and do what you can to help save this special project in this special place.

One of the reasons I still use Search.Twitter.com is that I like the simplistic time line aspect (cause I’m a simple guy). It’s one of the reasons I’m not as bugged as I pretend to be by the fact that searches on there go back only a few weeks at most.

I’m usually curious if someone has said something very recently (often in the last few minutes), or asked or answered a question in the last few minutes.

Topic, keyword and phrase searches of Twitter – no matter what search site you’re using – are subject to what Timothy Bishop (above comment) so delicately calls the “relevance” problem.

Thank you again for another insightful look at how to make the web a better tool. We’ve had good luck using twitter.search in the past in past because most of our efforts have focused on real time outreach for our local Main Street program and limiting the geographic radius to within 25 miles of our search has been helpful in restricting our search results to relevant tweets.

As we’ve recently started using twitter and other social networking efforts to promote a statewide effort, we quickly ran into the very problem you mentioned regarding relevance. We’ll put your latest advice to work and keep you posted on our success.

Thanks

As usual you are right on top of the search world and your comment is spot on. Of course, I knew you’d find a way to point out (without pointing it out) that our Denver Broncos did not make the playoffs. Go Vikings!

Topsy is cool, but it runs into the same issue that we brought up in the article. Because most Twitterers are idiots, pitchmen or “social media experts” – you have to learn how to manipulate your search terms to find the real gold, no matter what Twitter search tool you’re using (whether it be Topsy, Collecta, OneRiot or Google, for that matter).

It is odd, but in many ways predictable, that the worst search tool is Twitter’s own Search.Twitter.com. What’s with that?!!

Your last paragraph is the most incisive, though. We continue to see people flock to the false gods of keywords, web optimization and search engine marketing. The web is a vast gold mine of people and information that can help your business thrive. Learning how to mine that gold mine for the really good stuff is what search is all about. Hmm…. must be a blog article in that!

Thanks Sam, for a great comment.

The good news is there a slew of other “real time post” search engines now. My favorite is: http://topsy.com

Topsy organizes relevant Twitter search results quite well, and it offers a lot of other nice features (e.g. on the right side, it will give you the folks who are most Tweeting about your search term). Plus, Topsy provides archived Tweets, which can be helpful especially when searching companies or people.

For example, the Topsy results for mywedding colorado (don’t add the .com in a Topsy search or it will default to a site: search) brought back lots of results related to the move. However, Topsy organized them so all of the re-tweets were “lumped” together. Thus, you can easily see all of the original Tweets as they were written by their original authors.

NOTE: Unfortunately with this specific search, there really seems to be only one article that folks are either retweeting or just copy/pasting to create a new Tweet so this is a really bad example of Topsy in action. But try another search term like “super bowl vikings” (sorry, can’t help myself) and you’ll see that Topsy does a good job of delivering and organizing a wide range of interesting results.

What’s also cool is seeing the re-tweeters. So, for example, type in “Hidden Business Treasures” in Topsy and you’ll see a lot of results — basically all of Michael and Sheryl’s Tweets. Next to each result is a box with a number in it — this is the number of re-tweeters. Click on the box and you can see who they are. Michael/Sheryl — lots of people like your work!

Michael/Sheryl–you are so right that searching of real time posts can be an amazing Sales/Relationship Intelligence tool. The good news is really smart people keep creating cool tools like Topsy so we can continue to mine the Web for great information.

I hope this helps.

Sam
http://www.samrichter.com