iPhone: A Mobile Media Intelligence Platform

by Bill French on 19/01/10 at 6:46 am

Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

Business intelligence is a term that always seemed a bit ambiguous to me. It just never resonated with me as a term that had specific meaning that I could relate to until I started using tools such as Roambi and PUSHBI for iPhone. These tools provide useful data modeling, distribution, and rendering solutions for small screens – specifically iPhone. They provide foundational services and solutions for any range of data but are typically used for operational reporting.

While these tools fall into the traditional business intelligence genre, I’ve noticed a trend among business professionals to incorporate social media intelligence into their daily activities as guideposts for sales, marketing, and business development. This is not an unexpected trend – social content has become one of the most utilized mediums that consumers turn to for advice, awareness, and buying decisions.

Relatively new iPhone apps have emerged for mobile social media intelligence but you might not recognize them as business intelligence tools. These apps are peripherally aligned with market intelligence and most would recognize them in far different categories. However, they are programmable to the degree that they can provide significant intelligence-gathering utility.

Gist

We’ve written about Gist in the past; a service that magically intersects your inbox with the web providing a unified view of your contacts, companies, and conversations. Today we look at Gist in a different light – a framework for developing a social media listening post. While Gist is designed to track people that you’ve had conversations with in the past and future, it can also be shaped to track people and companies that you don’t know or have relationships with [yet].

Imagine you’re in the real estate business and you want to track all of the top real estate professionals that are using Twitter and active in social media. Here’s a quick method for adding a gistonomy to your Gist service.

Create a special Twitter account; give it any name you want and make it a protected account.
Open your browser to TweetML (the Most Influential Real Estate People list); scroll to the bottom and login to your special Twitter account; this will cause your special Twitter account to follow all the people in the list.
Login to your Gist account; select the Account option (upper right), and connect the special Twitter account into your Gist account; the most influential real estate people on Twitter will be added to your Gist account.

You now have a comprehensive tracking approach for real estate in social media. You can also refine your gistonomy by tagging all of these new people with a special keyword so you can see them all with one click. Lastly, consider tuning them over time to reflect your interests in their conversations.

Example displays in Gist for iPhone

HootSuite

For businesses, managing Twitter accounts and engaging in social media is best accomplished with a web-based application designed for multiple accounts and multiple participants. There are two systems that do this well; CoTweet and HootSuite . HootSuite is my preferred choice if mobile media intelligence is required (with iPhone).

HootSuite, like Gist, is presently a free web-based service that also includes a native iPhone app. And also like Gist, HootSuite can be programmed to provide visibility into specific areas of market and social media interest while also serving as your Twitter authoring and reading platform.

HootSuite provides a flexible multi-account/multi-panel approach that can be configure to display numerous aspects about your Twitter account. But it also supports arbitrary [persistent] search panels that can be customized to display the most recent tweets about keywords, other Twitter accounts, and any general content that’s important to your social media monitoring strategy.

For a client, I’m presently tracking information about the Olympics (I provide media intelligence services and solutions). The objective with this client is to watch for issues and market intelligence concerning transportation in Vancouver. My client provides ground transportation for many of Colorado’s top ski resorts and frequently must perform under the heavy stress of World Cup events, Aspen X-Games, and other international sports events. Learning as much as possible from customers and transportation providers will help them understand how to improve their own services and compete more effectively.

The example screenshot shows multiple columns about their Twitter presence – one is a persistent search which is always updating with tweets from the public timeline about “Olympics Vancouver Transportation”. Finding problems and successes is far easier with this approach and often leads to deeper awareness of new Twitter users that are useful market barometers.

Example displays in HootSuite for iPhone

Commonly used HootSuite columns include features for monitoring mentions of your Twitter account, direct messages, sent messages, and search columns. Other types of columns may also be configured for tracking activity in Linkedin, Facebook, and even Twitter lists.

Media Intelligence Legos

With a small number of iPhone apps it’s possible to create a fairly comprehensive approach to monitoring and awareness in social media. The costs are insignificant and setting these services in place is relatively straight-forward. I recommend you keep it simple and think about your mobile intelligence strategy as a collection of building blocks that can be replaced with the most useful information sources relevant to your intelligence requirements.