Ask HN: Review new MightyBrand project, micro-monitoring your brand via Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review new MightyBrand project, micro-monitoring your brand via Twitter

11 pointsryanwaggoner10 comments

MightyTweets is a new side project we're experimenting with at MightyBrand. We're collecting all this data and we're looking for useful things we can do with it, so now you can use Twitter to monitor blogs, Twitter, Digg, news, etc. You don't have to sign up for anything, just follow these instructions:

1. Follow @mightytweets on Twitter.

2. Wait for your welcome message from us (usually delivered in a couple of minutes)

3. Send us a direct message with the brand you want to track. (example: D mightytweets track yourbrand)

We'll send you a DM every time someone mentions your brand, or once per hour if you get a lot of mentions.

We'd love to know what HN thinks. Is this useful?

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Can you expand on what you monitor? If it's just blogs, twitter, digg and news, why wouldn't I just subscribe to a few RSS feeds in my feed reader?

Right now, it's just blogs, digg, news, and twitter, but we have a slew of services that are in testing right now that we hope to launch in the next few weeks.

Aside from that, I'd say that there are a few benefits over RSS:

1. It's faster to setup and start tracking something, as all you have to do is send us a tweet. This might work especially well for stuff you just want to track for a couple days, when setting up a bunch of search feeds is overkill.

2. A lot of people still don't use RSS, but use Twitter.

3. I tend to only check my RSS once a day or even every other day, while I'm likely to be on Twitter all day, so I'll see stuff more quickly than I will with RSS.

This is just off the top of my head...as I said, this is an experiment for us, so all feedback is useful :)

More easily tracking your brand (or your competitors) = helpful.

Doing it through Twitter DMs = not so much, imho.

Twitter just has way too much noise, so it's not a great interface for receiving alerts about important information. I'd rather get alerts via RSS or some sort of custom dashboard. Better yet -- offer the alerts as many different ways as possible: RSS, Twitter, web dashboard, iPhone app, email, etc. and let users use as many different alert methods as they want.

For my last job (community management at a startup), I had a ton of RSS feeds set up pulling in blog searches, Twitter searches, web searches, etc. on our brand. I also had email alerts set up, and a Twhirl running in the background on our Twitter account pinging me on @ replies. My goal was to make sure I had as many different ways to catch, filter, and alert on all that info as possible so I didn't miss anything important. (Something to filter out the redundancies would have been nice, fyi! :)).

That's not a bad idea, but I think you approaching it from the wrong end.

Specifically, the twitter-less monitoring interface (e.g. a daily email) would make lot more sense. At least to someone who is not a Twitter user, but would like to track what's being said there about the product/company/etc.

We have it from the other end at http://MightyBrand.com

Quick poll: if we added an email-only version of MightyBrand where you got a daily email of all of your social media mentions, would you use it? How much would you pay? $5 / month? $10 / month?

$20/year. It's just a shortcut for sifting through a website logs and following the referrers. That's unless you have more functionality such as a statistics and pretty graphs to analyze the spread patterns (who said what and who picked it up) and trends (daily/weekly % changes, etc).

In this case I think a small account will be able to justify the $5 month. For the large accounts you can charge $100/mo and they will pay as long as the service in itself is useful.

(edit) Just checked your pricing - 24$/mo. Ehrm .. hrm .. well .. is it working well ? Especially since you are trying to sell the same service to the individuals and the enterprises. The enterprises will likely think it's not "enterprisy" enough, and individuals - that it's overpriced and an overkill for them. At least that's my guess based on what what 5 sec. impression was (and I am in the need of a such as service).

Tracking brands/keywords is something people need. But, is Twitter the right tool? How is this different than Google Alerts?

Twitter may not be the right tool; we just don't know yet, which is why we threw this thing together. Our main web app is http://MightyBrand.com, and is a better example of a full-fledged brand tracking app.

As to your 2nd question, Google Alerts doesn't track everything we track now, and tracks a small slice of what we'll be tracking in the next few weeks.

i don't prefer to send me a DM. I already have a lot of SPAM on it and I don't read it no more.

So why not create a site, where i can log and find my alerts?

This option is already available with Google Alert (have you tried it). It sends me daily reports of keywords mentioned on the web.

We already have this at http://MightyBrand.com which is our main web app. This is a little side experiment to try and leverage some of the infrastructure we've built in interesting ways.

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