Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).

TweetScan is one of several services offering email alerts based on keywords

Personally, I’ve been using TweetScan to track these terms I’m interested in:

1. Optaros
2. open source
3. Newburyport
4. vegan
5. jeckman

To avoid the “stalker effect” I don’t immediately reach out and @reply to anyone who mentions any of these terms, though I do often follow them to see if it is a common part of their conversation, which would suggest I might be interested in their stream.

Unfortunately, as the folks behind Tweetscan recently announced, they’re going to start charging for this service:

Tweet Scan is due for some improvements and the volume of queries and emails we’re handling isn’t sustainable on a hobby budget. So we’re going to start requiring a small annual payment to keep an account with us.

Please use the subscribe link below and let’s take this site to the next level! It’s $15 per year if you sign up by April 22nd. After that it’ll be $20 per year.

I can certainly understand the need to monetize an application that becomes popular and starts to generate a high volume of usage, but I’m not yet ready to pay for an account for personal use, so I found a few alternatives. (Note Tweetscan can also enable you to download you tweets since December 2007, and can be used as a live Twitter search engine).

TweetBeep

TweetBeep also sends email alerts based on the mention of specific keywords in Twitter, and can track specific URLs, whether they have been url shortened or not. TweetBeep lets you set frequency of alerts as well.

(It seems, though I haven’t verified this yet in practice, that the alerts based on domains – so an alert set for any reference to optaros.com or openparenthesis.org, for example – can’t be scheduled into hourly/daily as keyword alerts can, but are set to “live” – which may mean immediate? This might be an issue if you have a domain frequently referenced in Twitter streams.)

TweetLater

TweetLater, which is most well known for its “schedule a tweet for posting at a later time” feature, also provides a feature they describe as “Track keywords on Twitter” as part of their free account. They also provide other features:

• Auto DM to new followers (which I find frankly annoying)
• Automated following of folks who follow you (which I don’t do, but is not annoying)
• Automated unfollowing of those who unfollow you (hmm, that might be interesting)
• Vet new followers (this one I haven’t tried yet – not quite clear to me what it is except perhaps an easier way to act on new followers – follow, ignore, or block – rather than the one at a time approach twitter offers)

TweetLater also offers a professional / premium account for $29.97 a month which adds other features and is worth checking out for serious users.

What tools are you using to monitor the twittersphere?

(Photo from Marc Amos via BrightKite)

You can find her own recap here (with slides). Here’s some random notes I jotted (on my phone to evernote) I found interesting:

Don’t try to actively manage identities / profiles / updates on the 600+ sites out there. Don’t let your profiles rule your life.

Instead, choose just three: she chose Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Why? Those are the ones which seem most useful to her for locating clients, getting key news updates, and keeping in touch with friends. Your three may vary.

[I feel a need for closer to ten: Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, BrightKite, Dopplr, TripIt, Last.fm, and Identi.ca. I guess if I were to choose between Linked In and Xing, between Dopplr and TripIt, and between Twitter and Identi.ca, I'd be down to seven. Still can't quite get to three. That also leaves out project specific ones like Drupal.org or WordPress.org where I have an account/profile associated with a specific community, or broad aggregators like Chi.mp, Strands, and FriendFeed, not to mention my own johneckman.com - but then I don't update those directly, they copy content from other places.]

Half of her clients (as a social media consultant) she advises not to focus on Twitter. For example, law firms or regulated industries which have significant privacy concerns – even with “protected” accounts it has happened that Twitter has inadvertently exposed private messages. That said, though, one of her clients – La Casa De Las Vides winery in Valencia – founder her on twitter as she was tweeting with someone in Spanish. (They’re having a Boston Blogger Wine Tasting this week).

This doesn’t mean, though, that you should ignore the sites you aren’t going to keep as your primary networks. You should regularly claim your name: get your logo, picture, link up. This is important to prevent others from claiming your name and acting as you.

She uses repeater services like ping.fm to post to her secondary networks once or twice a day – just so the accounts don’t fall dormant – but doesn’t push all updates everywhere as that gets too spammy.

Her social toolbox includes:

• Evernote (great notetaking client for Mac, Windows, Linux, and many phones)
• Shareaholic
• Ubiquity / Firefox 3.x
• Ping.fm
• Twhirl / Tweetdeck
• Textexpander [see Texter for Windows]
• Quicksilver
• Google Tools: Mail, Calendar, Docs, Analytics, etc

She also includes as a tool her phone: HTC Mogul (Windows Smartphone) running iCal and SyncMate for Mac.

She also discussed FriendFeed, Strands, SocialMedian, SocialThing, Yammer, and SocialCast, as well as TweetBeep.

Are you able to limit your activity and profile management to just three sites?