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The Mumbai Terrorist event has clearly shown us that we have moved to a culture of immediate news consumption.  We thought we were there with CNN, but Twitter and other tools have shown that the immediacy was no longer in the viewing – it’s now in the data collection.

All major news services were monitoring Twitter during Mumbai.  They were taking advantage of a new information source, just like the rest of us.  Some of this worked well, some did not.

And now we have the retrospective.  How did that work? 

Steve Herrmann at the BBC has a post discussing the soul-searching The BBC is now doing after Mumbai. 

Immediacy Has a Price

The software development adage:

“You can have your software fast, good, or cheap – pick two.”

fits well here.  Replace “software” with “news” and we’re rolling.  (at least for the moment).  For years we’ve have good and cheap.  Face it, we’ve always received our news for pennies since the advent of the printing press.

Immediacy has a price – and it isn’t the “cheap” option.  We have fast and cheap now. 

With Mumbai we have an excellent example of a dispersed, confused, stressful situation.  People of good faith were tweeting and re-tweeting objects of news based on their faith in the network.  Most of this information was good, some of it was garbage.

People were looking for answers. Sensational garbage can easily rise to the top because it’s often confirming our worst fears or bolstering our deepest hopes.

Acquisition Isn’t the Only Transaction Cost

News as a product runs on information.  It is true that immediate communication gives news organizations faster and cheaper information.  However, while the cost of acquisition is certainly a major component to news – verification is the other.

Reputation engines may well serve the verification need in the future.  A source can be deemed “credible” based on their reputation scores.  But this certainly isn’t infallible. 

If I have a very high score and am walking down a street in Phuket and suddenly a huge crowd runs down the street screaming “Tsunami!”  I’m going to run and likely tweet “I am in Phuket and running from a Tsunami!”

My source was a crowd of people with no discernable credibility rating other than their panic. 

In an uncertain time, you get uncertain information.

BBC is Introspective

The BBC is doing well to both be introspective after Mumbai and to be relatively transparent in doing so. 

Steve says:

Is it confusing to have reports from our own correspondents, along with official statements, pictures, video, accounts from other media, bloggers, emails and Twitter, all together on the same page? It’s true that normally we separate them out - news stories in one place, correspondents’ reports in another, Have Your Say comments and links to blogs somewhere else.

But on a major unfolding story there is a case also for simply monitoring, selecting and passing on the information we are getting as quickly as we can, on the basis that many people will want to know what we know and what we are still finding out, as soon as we can tell them.

Steve is acknowledging the transition of the mainstream media from a news source to a news aggregator and analyzer.  Some of the news comes from their highly trusted generators (reporters and informants), but others is now going to come from bloggers and tweeters and the like.  It would be self-defeating not to include these new sources.

We must also note that this is both new and frightening to an organization like the BBC.  They must simultaneously understand how to present this information effectively and deal with the major impact this has on their corporate culture.

This is not SOP.

BBC is Outward Looking

I’d also like to give quick props to Steve Herrmann and the BBC for having many links in his post that are pointed outside the BBC domain.  One of my news site pet peeves is that they have ample inward pointing links.

This small fact lets me know that Mumbai’s lessons for global reporting will have an impact.

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate. Follow him on Twitter.

Twitter is a communication platform.  It is a hub where people discuss where they eat, get recommendations, learn, interact, and plan gatherings.

People are social.  They eat, they meet with each other, they talk about their experiences.  If you are a restaurant, you want to be part of this conversation.

When looking in Twitter, restaurant owners often search for conversations relating directly to their restaurant.  “Am I being talked about?”  So they will search for “Bick’s Restaurant” and be happy with the results or lack thereof.

But do you understand the conversations that are actually happening that make your restaurant relevant?

For example, questions like “Where should I eat?”  The results are numerous.  Are you the response they are getting back?

What are they saying about restaurants in general? When people are dissatisfied, is it because of the food, the service, the experience?  If we search “restaurant sucked” or “excellent food” what do we see?

And when these people on Twitter have a gathering, are they coming to your restaurant? What gatherings are forming?  Who is forming them?  Here there are 4 pages of tweets talking about this particular dinner.

There are a massive number of sites on the web where people might be talking about your restaurant.  Key sites like Twitter are communication hubs that often point at other information.  Here we see blog posts that mention restaurants that are broadcast over Twitter.

You can search Twitter by using The Twitter Search Utility  or you can use tools like Twitscoop which give you graphs showing how often you are discussed.

In the end, it’s not necessarily the tool you use to make the search.  The power of a pool of information like Twitter is how you search.  What is that key piece of information that Twitter is hiding that can bring in more customers?

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate. Follow him on Twitter.

Okay, I admit it.  I’m important to me.  But for businesses, many things are important.  Your brand, your products, mentions of things within your industry.

TweetBeep allows you to enter search strings that are run at regular intervals and, if there is a hit, it mails them to you.

You simply enter the search string and whether you want it to send you information every hour or every day.

You can even search for information from specific users or to specific users, as well as tweets in a specific location.

If you own a restaurant with a fairly common name, you can only search tweets from people in the area.

TweetBeep can help automate your data mining and market research efforts on Twitter.

A very handy, free tool all the way around.

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate. Follow him on Twitter.

So there are about 2 billion applications doing silly things with Twitter data. With millions of users monthly, there’s a ton of data to play with – and people are playing.

After going through about 30 of these applications this morning, I now have a much deeper respect for the Twitter folks and their ability to keep the wheels glued on their poor API-abused cart.

To follow up my “Twitter is a Sea of Market Research” post, I thought I’d highlight Twist. Twist is a simple data mining and comparison tool with a nice and easy to use UI. You simply type in some concepts and hit enter. The fact that they have a blue background and blue type for the keywords is a bit wonky, but here’s my results.

Here we see, concretely and without fear of popular reprisal, that Marx was wrong by a wide margin. Religion is not the opiate of the masses, bacon is.

At only two points over this week, bacon failed to trounce religion (and those were likely big sell off moments on the stock market).

From here, you can click to see discussions revealing exactly why bacon is so spiritually rewarding:

People seem to be talking about bacon every four minutes! That’s pretty cool if you happen to be a baconmonger.

When doing market research, you want 3 things:

1. Unbiased reporting
2. The ability to compare your data set to other data sets
3. Some insight into “why” the person made this

Twist very quickly allows the users to search for and track trends of keywords, either alone or in comparison. After seeing the trends, users can look at exactly what people are saying.

Currently Twist does not let you save queries or make them at regular intervals. So if you’re doing the work, you have to go to the site daily.

But, hey, they just gave you a de-focused focus group of millions of people. What’ya want for your $0 expenditure?

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate. Follow him on Twitter.

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Either directly or indirectly, Twitter is loaded with market intelligence for your business. With an estimated 3 million current users who are voraciously talking about what makes them happy and what makes them angry - your products and your market segment are likely being discussed. Let’s take a walk through how this works.

Using Twitter search, we can quickly find mentions of our products or company in specific context.

Here we see an easy one (unfortunate for Qwest), but as Qwest we’d like to see who is talking about us. A quick check for “Qwest Sucks” brings up a litany of complaints about Qwest and its service. Many of these are very specific complaints that can be cross-checked, verified and used to improve service. It’s also an excellent measure of popular opinion about our company.

Mind you, opinion’s not always negative. Another search for “Qwest Rocks,” shows that sentiment about Qwest isn’t all negative.

Qwest customer services has indeed made some users happy. Qwest should be directly thanking these users for their patronage and letting them know they enjoy working with them.

For the less positive ones, Qwest should also respond and let them know they have been heard.
But we don’t need to be so specific. Suppose we are opening an Italian restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District. Maybe we want to know the buzz on other Italian restaurants in Portland and the Pearl District in general.

Here we see that there are a few tweets talking about Italian food in Portland and at least one pointing us to more detailed information in specific blog posts.

We can also look at the frequency of posts to tell us how hot Italian food might actually be in Portland and compare that to some other types of food.

We can also check on the Pearl District itself. Are people going to the Pearl District? Why are they going there? Is an Italian restaurant going to fit there?

We can see by the age and frequency of tweets that the Pearl District in general is more popular in Portland than Italian Restaurants.

Is Twitter going to be your only source of Market Data? Certainly not.

But Twitter is a great, free repository of general and honest conversation from which we can gather a wide range of information.

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate.  Follow him on Twitter.