Strategic law firm intelligence via Summize and Twitter
Innovative lawyers, law firms, and legal professionals know they need to monitor the blogopshere as part of the their strategic intelligence efforts. Subscribing to an RSS feed of Google blog searches of their names, competitor's names, subjects of litigation and transactional work, expert witnesses, and keywords relating to their practice niche is now routine.
But with the growing use of Twitter by those active in social networking and social media, monitoring the blogosphere alone is not enough. You need to monitor what people are 'micro-blogging' at Twitter. A lot can be said about you - good and bad - in 140 characters of text broadcast to hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of a person's followers on Twitter.
I subscribe to an RSS feed of keywords and key phrases mentioned on Twitter via Summize.
Summize is a search engine for Twitter that, like Google Blog Search for blogs, allows you to subscribe to searches. You don't browse searches ala a standard Google Search, you subscribe to an RSS feed of your search so as to read updates in your RSS newsreader.
Take a look at how I followed feedback on Twitter to LexBlog's launch of LexMonitor last Friday. This represents the most recent 'tweets' from today (Sunday). I noted how recent those 'tweets' were with arrows on the left.
As you'll see, it's a 3 step process. 1) Key in the word or phrase you want to follow; 2) Click search; and 3) Click the RSS feed button to add the ongoing search results to your RSS newsreader.
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Two other tools people use to monitor Twitter conversation are Quotably (powered by Summize displaying threads of 'tweets') and Tweetscan.
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