Manchester-based developer Martin Rue has just launched tweetdoc.org, a tool “to help companies produce documents that facilitate brand monitoring, competitor analysis and market analysis through the power of Twitter”. Uh?
Let me explain. Companies need to keep an eye on what their customers are saying, mainly so they can spot when things are going wrong and intervene before a PR disaster strikes. tweetdoc.org collects all the tweets around a particular brand, company or event and whacks them in a single document for you. Pretty useful for PR types struggling to keep up with the real-time stream, no? All you have to do is enter a search term or hashtag and tweetdoc.org will spit out a PDF containing the results. And very handy for brand monitoring and competitor analysis, too. tweetdoc.org has paired up with document publishing platform edocr.com to enable documents like brand monitoring reports to be uploaded and shared with a single click.
But it’s a bit limited, isn’t it, just collecting tweets? And by the time you’ve created one of these PDFs and distributed it, isn’t it already too late to deal with the problem? Doesn’t a PDF (of all formats!) feel a bit lifeless and unhelpful, even to smaller firms who don’t need the complex features of a solution like 6consulting‘s? Well, maybe. But in the case of events (which is what tweetdoc.org was originally designed for), pretty much every tweet carries the same hashtag. For those of us into regularly staging and promoting events via social media, this is actually a pretty cool way to keep a record of the endeavour. And for retrospective analysis or charity work, it could be useful in measuring and recording the reach of a particular message.
With Twitter search results getting shorter and shorter, it has become impossible to rely on the service to retrieve what was said about you, your company or your event, even yesterday. Twitter search is completely broken. But tweetdoc.org is a simple way to keep a record of what was said about you on Twitter, and it works. So the next time I stage an event, I might just keep a record for posterity with tweetdoc.org.