MackCollier.com

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You need a company blog because the customer (thinks he) is always right

This morning I was making myself a Belgian waffle. I know from past experiences that if I put too much batter in the maker, that it will run out the sides, and when I open the maker, the batter will stick to both sides, and I’ll have a ruined waffle on my hands, and a mess to clean up.

Again, I know this.  But I went ahead this morning and added too much batter, it ran out the sides, and sure enough, I had a ruined waffle on my hands.  As I was cleaning up the mess, I caught myself thinking ‘This thing sucks’.

It wasn’t the waffle-maker’s fault that the waffle was ruined, it was my fault. But like a lot of people would do in a similar situation, I tried to pass the blame to the product, instead of admitting it was my fault.  Completely irrational, but who ever accused humans of being rational creatures? 🙂

I decided to check, and the waffle-maker (Black and Decker) does have a blog.  But the blog doesn’t allow comments. If your company decides to turn off comments then you have to realize that you are effectively limiting yourself to only being found via search engines.  And yes, I understand that many companies don’t want to allow comments because they don’t want to deal with negative feedback from customers. But as studies have proven, negative feedback is usually good for your company, if you handle it correctly.

Don’t view your blog as being a marketing tool, but more as being a customer service tool. A place where you can help me solve problems with your products, or get more information. A company blog is an especially wonderful place to help me with problems that *I* create, such as the above episode with my waffle maker.  Black and Decker could use its existing blog to write a post on 5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Belgian Waffle, and make one of those steps be ‘Don’t put too much batter in the maker!’  Then if the blog turned on comments, I could have left one saying that I used the blog’s tips, and created a perfect Belgian waffle, and am happy with my Black and Decker Belgian waffle maker!

So if your company has a blog, keep these content creation tips in mind:

1 – Don’t create product-centric content, create customer-centric content. Think about how your customers will use your products, and why. For example, a post from Black and Decker touting the production advantages and benefits of its waffle-maker is almost meaningless to me, since I already own it. But if B&D writes a post on how to create the perfect Belgian Waffle, that helps their existing AND potential customers, because the content is customer-centric.

2 – View your company blog as a customer service tool more than a marketing tool. The blog isn’t a place to sell your products, it’s a place to sell the products benefits, and connect with your customers. If you’ll open up comments and use the blog as a place to address customer concerns, you’ll find that your customers will not only become more loyal, they will promote you to others. Which, ironically, becomes far more effective marketing than anything you could do via a blog post!

3 – Your blog should supplement your existing content, not replace it. A big reason why you don’t want to include a lot of product-centric posts on your blog is because all that information should already be on your website. Your customers will come to the blog to get more specific information on how to use your products, or to get in touch with you about an issue they are having.  For example, if I had no idea why my waffle maker was ruining my waffles, I would have searched to see if Black and Decker had a blog, before I searched for the company’s website.  Because I know that I have a better chance of finding information that would solve my issue on the company blog versus the company website.  You need to understand this as well, and give your customers the information they are looking for, in the place where they are looking for it.

Just curious, but when you have a problem with a product, are you more likely to go to the company website or blog to look for help?

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Reminder: The Marketing Profs B2B Forum is just 10 days away!

We are just 10 days away from one of my favorite marketing conferences, the Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston! As you know, there will be a LIVE #Blogchat as part of this year’s B2B Forum, and it will be held on June the 14th, at the end of the 1st day of the event.

Also, Marketing Profs and I are pleased to announce that the Live #Blogchat will be sponsored by Sensei Marketing! You are probably familiar with Sam Fiorella and Brandie McCallum who are both part of the Sensei Marketing team, and both are very active on Twitter.  The topic of the Live #Blogchat will be Managing your blogging strategy, how to figure out how the pieces all fit together, and Sam will be co-hosting the discussion with me!  We are thrilled to have Sensei Marketing sponsoring the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum and if you’ll be attending you’ll love meeting and connecting with their team!

Also, I wanted to remind you that if you want to participate in the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum you can only do so by attending the B2B Forum!  And luckily, Marketing Profs has worked out a discount code for us, just register at this link and use code BLOGCHAT.  That will get you a $100 discount!

Now, if you can’t join us in-person, you can still view the event online.  You can register for the B2B Forum Online here, and use code BLOGCHAT to get a 30% discount! Now please understand that the Live #Blogchat will NOT be part of the B2B Forum Online.  It will give you online access to the sessions during the day, but not for the Live #Blogchat.  Again, the only way to participate in the Live #Blogchat is by attending the event on-site.

I do hope you can join us either online or at the event, as the Marketing Profs conferences truly are among the best you can attend, and you’ll get far more business value than the cost of attendance!  And if you will be attending, please leave a comment so we can start connecting now before the event!

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Online Influence Is More Than Just Social Media Activity

I logged into Klout this morning, and was greeted by this pop-up ‘warning’.  It tells me that my Klout score is dropping, and that I can raise it by sharing more content, and engaging with my network.

Klout adds this explanation for what its score means: “The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence.”

So Klout tells me that it measures online influence, but that in order to increase my score, I should increase my social media activity?  Then doesn’t that mean it’s measuring my activity instead of my influence?

Likewise, Empire Avenue also explains that your score there is dependent on your level of social media activity: “When you join Empire Avenue, you can connect your Social Networking accounts, and we’ll score activity and engagement in each account and give you a virtual share price.”

Essentially, Klout and Empire Avenue are measuring your level of social media activity, not your level of online influence.

Simply sharing more content and engaging with my network isn’t going to make me more influential over them.  In fact if it’s not the type of content and engagement that they are looking for, my influence over them will fall, not rise as I become more active.

Also note that both Klout and Empire Avenue are encouraging you to participate with their site.  EA includes activity on the site as part of your score, and Klout is already encouraging you to give +K to other members, and I’m betting they will come up with other ways to reward you for interacting more with other Klout members.  Which is smart of both sites to do, but it doesn’t help either of them more effectively measure my perceived online influence.

What do you think?  What role does social media activity play in online influence?  Does one lead to the other?

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TNT’s Falling Skies is using Twitter, but what about a Twitter chat?

A couple of days ago on Twitter I noticed that TNT was promoting its account for the upcoming TV series Falling Skies.  The series has a Twitter account, but a report from Tweet Stats shows the account has less than 50 tweets and has NEVER left a reply on Twitter.  So basically, Falling Skies is using Twitter as a promotional channel for the show, and pushing out updates, interviews with stars, etc.

This is why I think Twitter Chats would be perfect for a television show.  Create a chat that brings together fans of a show, in order to generate interest.  And ironically, TNT has a history of using Twitter Chats to promote its shows, as they did with Saving Grace two years ago.   All they would have to do is have a fan run the chat, and go from there.  I did a quick Google search and found a fan that has already started a podcast for Falling Skies, so someone like this would be perfect to host a Twitter Chat for the same show.

This really seems more effective than promoted tweets or accounts because you are tapping into activities that fans are engaging in anyway.  Fans are going to be on Twitter talking about the show, an organized chat simply makes this process EASIER for the fans.  So by creating the chat you are not only building a channel to create buzz for Falling Skies, you are also making it easier for fans of the series to engage in EXISTING behavior.  That’s the key, you aren’t asking fans to do something that they weren’t already doing, and you are going to make it easier for them.

And when you consider that #Blogchat generates up to 5,000 tweets and a few million impressions in an hour, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect similar or even higher numbers from a #FallingSkiesChat.  I am sure TNT could organize this chat for far less than what they are paying Twitter for promoted tweets.  In fact, a show poster signed by the cast might be enough of an enticement to a fan of the series to moderate a chat on Twitter.

The point is, there are a ton of opportunities on Twitter for companies, especially media presences, to leverage Twitter chats to promote their offerings.  Don’t just view promoted tweets and accounts as your only options.  That’s very old-school ‘push’ mentality.   Have you seen any other examples of movies or television shows leveraging Twitter chats besides Saving Grace?  Which ones worked, in your opinion?

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Wait, my blog’s search traffic is down, what happened?

Welcome to another edition of ‘What can we learn about our own blog from watching Mack obsess over his?’

Ok, as most of you know, in January I decided to ramp up my posting schedule.  Since this blog’s launch 2 years ago (BTW Happy Birthday!) up till January of this year, I had kept to a pretty consistent schedule of 1-2 posts a week.  Sometimes I’d have a bit more, sometimes a bit less.

But if mid January, I decided to really boost my posting here.  I went from 1-2 posts a week, to 4-6.  I immediately saw a huge spike in traffic, and along with it, search traffic.  Now to be fair, search traffic here was already increasing at a steady pace, but as soon as I started posting more in mid January, the gain increased.  Here’s a graph of my weekly search traffic over the life of the blog:

The X marks the spot at which I started posting more often in January, and as you can see, the last 6 weeks or so has been sideways.  Also note the slow and steady growth, but it seemed to kick up an extra notch right after the X.

Now this graph bugs me, because I want to understand why search traffic has flattened over the past 6 weeks.  I did some checking and thinking and I’ve come up with two possibilities:

1 – I haven’t been posting as much. Every week since April the 10th, I have posted a consistent 4 posts a week here.  The next week is when search traffic started going sideways.  The three weeks prior to that, I posted 5-6 posts each week.  That’s one possibility.

2 – I haven’t been focusing as much on specific search keywords and phrases.  I honestly think this is it more than posting schedule.  From Jan through March I really tried to focus on specific keywords and phrases not only in my post title, but in the post as well.  And it really worked, I got excellent search rankings usually within a few hours for whatever search keyword/phrase I had targeted.

So here is the (very) inexact method I have come up with to test to see which is the cause of my flatlining search traffic.

This week, I will post 5 posts here.  This one is the second for this week, so there will likely be a new one here on Wednesday through Friday as well.

Next week, I will go back to posting 4 new posts here, but each one will be search optimized with a particular search keyword/phrase in the title and the post.

Then in a couple of weeks, I’ll report back and share the results with you.  My guess is that 4 search-optimized posts will produce more search traffic next week, than 5 non-optimized posts will this week.

And no, this isn’t a perfect test, and it won’t definitively prove anything.  This is more about me wanting to get a better understanding of how my blog works, and what impacts search results.  That way when I am at a conference and someone asks me a question about search traffic, I can give them my own experiences, instead of just regurgitating what some other blogger wrote 😉

If you obsess over your search traffic as well, what have you discovered that impacts it?  Do you think posting more often or spending more time optimizing for search will help me?

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Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride on Customer Co-Creation and Embracing Your Fans

I wanted to share this talk from Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride with you, as it has some pretty interesting branding and marketing takeaways that apply not just to the music industry. Pay close attention to Terry’s thought on how you can’t litigate or legislate customer behavior, but should instead understand it because that’s where the monetization opportunities lie. His example of how Spotify is decreasing peer-to-peer file sharing rates in Europe perfectly illustrates this point.

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Are we headed toward a Social Media snapback?

Let’s say you are presented with a unique and unexpected opportunity.  One that would require a several-month commitment, that would mean significantly shaking your life up, but could ultimately be the best thing that ever happened to you.

You need to ask some friends for advice.  People that know you completely, your life situation, and that you trust to give you good and sound advice.

Now if you needed to make a list of 5 people from your Twitter network to email (not including friends you know outside of Twitter or before you used Twitter), how long would it take you?  I ask because I often find myself in such a situation.  And every time I struggle to find more than 2-3 people that I would really trust to reach out to.  And every time I hear this tiny voice in my head saying ‘why is it that you are following these people?’

Which is a silly question to ask, because I am following everyone on Twitter and Facebook and wherever because I value the connections.  But do we reach a point at which adding more connections stops adding value?  Or worse, can we reach a point where adding more connections lessens the value of our existing connections?

Which becomes an interesting question to ask, when you consider that most social media sites and tools are built around making it easier to connect with more people.  But lately when I am on Twitter, for example, I’m often in Twitter chats.  I’m finding that I’m getting more enjoyment from Twitter chats, because even if the chat is huge like #Blogchat, I can zero in on a small discussion with just a few people, and really connect with them.  It becomes more like having dinner at a conference versus being with 500 people in a session.  I am seeing far more value in these discussions with smaller groups, and I’m finding that I am then starting to connect with them more outside of the chat.

So I have a couple of questions for you:

1 – Do you think in the next couple of years that we will see people begin to become more aggressive about ‘pruning’ their social networks, so that they have a deeper connection with the people they friend/follow versus just following them based on who they are?

And this is the far more interesting question to me…..

2 – If #1 holds true, will we begin to see a shift in the functionality of social media tools so that they encourage and facilitate smaller networks with deeper connections?  And what would that look like?  Simply limiting the number of connections you can have?  Maybe the ability to expand your network has to go through your existing network via an introduction or something similar?  Not sure, but I think the possibilities are endless.

 

What do you think?  Are you facing social media burnout?  Would you rather be loosely connected to 5,000 people, or closely connected with 50?

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How the CDC is Using its Blog to Prepare Us For the Zombie Apocalypse

One of the complaints you often hear from businesses and organizations about blogging is that they aren’t sure what type of content to create to reach their audience.  That they don’t know how a blog can help them build awareness for their particular product.  That it’s ‘too boring’ and that no one wants to read a blog post about….

A recent blog post by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) disproves the notion that there’s just some products and services you can’t blog about.  Let’s say you work for the CDC and your boss tells you to write a blog post that will explain how to build an emergency kit, and that will also raise awareness for the need to do so.  Oh, and you also need to get Twitter buzzing about the post.

Even with the recent horrible tornadoes and storms that have ripped through the South and Missouri, building an emergency kit is not something that is top of mind for most people.  And yet, the CDC has created a blog post that explains how to create an emergency kit that has Twitter buzzing and that currently has over 100 comments.

So how did the CDC take the topic of creating an emergency kit, and make it so interesting to so many people?  They explained that you need to create an emergency kit in order to prepare for the zombie apocalypse.

Genius!  What the CDC did is take a topic that’s not that interesting to a lot of people (building an emergency kit) and wrapped it in an analogy that is (the coming zombie apocalypse).  Check out some of the tips from the post:

  1. Identify the types of emergencies that are possible in your area. Besides a zombie apocalypse, this may include floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes. If you are unsure contact your local Red Cross chapter for more information.
  2. Pick a meeting place for your family to regroup in case zombies invade your home…or your town evacuates because of a hurricane. Pick one place right outside your home for sudden emergencies and one place outside of your neighborhood in case you are unable to return home right away.
  3. Identify your emergency contacts. Make a list of local contacts like the police, fire department, and your local zombie response team. Also identify an out-of-state contact that you can call during an emergency to let the rest of your family know you are ok.
  4. Plan your evacuation route. When zombies are hungry they won’t stop until they get food (i.e., brains), which means you need to get out of town fast! Plan where you would go and multiple routes you would take ahead of time so that the flesh eaters don’t have a chance! This is also helpful when natural disasters strike and you have to take shelter fast.

There’s several things I love about the approach of this post:

1 – It makes the CDC seem ‘more human’. They are showing they have a sense of humor, not to mention a knowledge of pop culture.  This post instantly makes the organization more accessible to more people.  That’s a good thing.

2 – They are spreading the message on terms that appeal to their target audience.  The CDC could have written this exact same post without the zombie references and verbiage, and it would have been far less interesting.  Which means it wouldn’t have been shared by nearly as many people.  But because the post was written focusing on a topic that’s more interesting to others, it will get shared by others.

3 – Even though the zombie analogy is added, the CDC’s core message still spreads.  This post still raises awareness of the need to create an emergency kit, and now the topic is more front-of-mind for a lot more people.  So the end goal of the CDC in creating this post, is achieved.

And the CDC was even smart enough to create badges you can add to your site/blog.

I love this approach, and I hope it will challenge you to think about how you can make your blog content more interesting to your readers.  BTW thanks to Geno for bringing this post to my attention via his excellent post on what Zombieland taught him about community-building.

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How One Blogger Has $20,000 a Month In Sales on Her EBook

A few weeks ago on a Sunday I was scrambling for topic ideas for that night’s #Blogchat when @SarahMaeWrites suggested we cover How to Create and Sell an EBook that night.  That sounded interesting, and then she DMed me to add that she had just created and sold one, so I thought ‘Perfect!’ and asked her to co-host.

Now what I didn’t realize is that this pretty young lady had unleashed a social media marketing dynamo to promote and create interest in her ebook.  She had a clear strategy, and was leveraging social media and her existing online network to promote the book.  And her strategy was working incredibly well, so well that she has now sold over 8,000 copies of the ebook in less than two months.  At $4.99 a pop.  Do the math kids, she’s making $20K a month JUST off this ebook.

And the reason why is because she created a valuable product and did a fantasmic job of promoting it and building interest in it by not only leveraging her community, but involving them in the entire process.  When I heard Sarah’s story I just knew this would be such a wonderful case study to help show others what really smart social media marketing looks like, so I asked Sarah if I could interview her, and she was gracious enough to accept:

Mack: What made you decide to write an ebook?

Sarah:   A few things…

First of all, I read this: Indie Author is Making Millions by Selling the App Store Way (I have no idea how I came across this article, I wasn’t searching for ebook info or anything like it.) I found the article fascinating and tucked it away in my mind.

The second thing that influenced my decision to write an ebook has to do with my serious procrastination skills (and lack of the ability to write on cue). I had an article due for a site I write for monthly and I had nothin’. I finally decided to go through my archives and I landed on a post from a series I did two years ago on cleaning (which was more about the heart than on the actual mechanics of cleaning). I posted it.

The response was significant; women were relating with what I wrote. I knew the content was something that could help and encourage women, and I wanted to get it out there.

The best part was that I knew I had enough posts to go ahead with the ebook on my time table (I have very limited time being a SAHM to little ones). My cleaning series was 31 days long – I had 30 articles to work with. Timing was also perfect – it was March and spring cleaning was just about in full swing. I knew I needed to put my series into a book and release it in April (time is crucial!).

 

Mack: What goes into the actual creation of an ebook?  And once you create it, how do you distribute it?  Do you put it on your servers and let people download it?

Sarah: For me, it’s mainly the writing I focus on. I hire a designer to do everything else, from turning my document into a PDF (anyone can do this, but I always seem to mess it up!) to having her format it on Kindle and Nook. I use (and highly recommend) Erin from insightblogdesign.com. She is professional, efficient, affordable, has an eye for design, and is an easy personality.

As for distributing it as a PDF download, I heard good things about E-Junkie, so I went with them (this I do myself-they take you step-by-step through the process). So far, so good. They also have an affiliate set-up, the ability to create discounts, video branding, and more.

 

Mack: When did you start promoting, before or after the ebook was released?

Sarah: I started promoting pretty much the minute I decided to put my series into an ebook. I deleted the posts from my site, began to re-work and update them, and let my readers in on the ride. I used social media because it is my platform – I have an audience on it. I had built up my personal blog, started another blog, and was hosting a conference. I am in the social media sphere because that is where my community is (one I am so thankful for, especially as a SAHM).

 

Mack: How did you use social media to promote the book?

Sarah: Here’s what I did: I held two launch day giveaways on my own two blogs to get things started with a bang (I contacted companies and asked them if they wanted to participate). I then asked many bloggers to review and/or have a giveaway of the book (reviews on blogs are key-the more the better). I did pay a few blogs for advertising. I used Twitter and Facebook to create a community around the book – a hashtag for Twitter and a fan page on FB (both of which I regularly interact with). I created a youtube video where I talk about the book (over 10,000 views) and I started a website for everything related to the book (including freebies). I also used the power of free to get the word spread. For one day only I offered the book for free to anyone who spread the word via social media channels. It was a wonderful success. I gave away over 2000 books, but the reach was just what I was looking for – I wanted to break through my own sphere of influence and reach beyond, and the free day did just that. It even got my book mentioned on two different radio stations in different states. The goal? Be everywhere.

I also put the book on Amazon Kindle. You’ve got to have your book on Kindle (and Nook).

(Mack’s note – Pay attention to where Sarah said she gave away 2,000 copies of the book in one day.  That might seem like she was losing sales, but note how she said that by doing that it greatly EXPANDED the reach of the ebook and pushed it past her network.  Allowing her to get MORE sales!)

 

Mack: What has been the biggest surprise from doing this ebook?

Sarah: The biggest surprise was the amount of ebooks I sold. I honestly was hoping to sell about 50…maybe 100 if I was “lucky.” I had no idea I would sell over 8000 copies in less than two months. Shocking, actually, comes to mind.

 

Mack: Are you thinking about doing additional ebooks now that your first has been so successful?

Sarah: Yes. Although now I’m in this interesting place of deciding if I want to continue with ebooks or go traditional publishing. If your ebook takes off, a publisher may want it. However, just last week Amazon announced that Kindle E-Book sales surpassed printed books for the first times. A sign of the times.

 

Isn’t that just the coolest story ever?  BTW here is another great post recapping Sarah’s process.  And of course, the ebook!  You can go here to learn more about it (and isn’t that site just amazing? ).  And please do check out her blog, Like a Warm Cup of Coffee.

Thanks Sarah!

UPDATE: Here’s some more information on some of the fees associated with selling the ebook, according to Sarah:

Addendum to the interview: I have been extremely blessed with the sales of my ebook, but please remember that I do factor in taxes and tithe, which takes 40% off my gross. On Amazon, I receive 70% royalties (for U.S. sales, 30% for abroad), and then take 40% off of that. Paypal charges about .44/book, and E-Junkie (where I distribute the PDF) charges $5/month.

And here’s the link to the post on Sarah’s site.

BTW some people seem to be a bit upset about the $20,000 figure being mentioned.  That was actually *my* idea, Sarah didn’t really even want to mention it, but I did because it would help get attention to the post because I wanted people to hear the strategy Sarah used as I think that’s the key.  Also, I changed the title as it technically wasn’t correct to say she was ‘making’ $20,000 a month, but again, that was my idea, not Sarah’s.

 

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A huge social media money-making opportunity in Twitter chat transcripts

We just wrapped up another amazing #Blogchat on Twitter.  If you aren’t familiar with #Blogchat, it’s the largest chat on Twitter, and when it gets rolling starting at 8pm Central, there will be over a tweet left every second.  So while there is a TON of great info, it’s impossible to keep up with everything.

And a lot of people won’t even try, and up till a few weeks ago, they would wait till 9pm Central when I would post a transcript for #Blogchat that I had created with a free site called WTHashtag.  But there were some changes to Twitter’s Terms of Service, and apparently WTHashtag.com is down now.

But, I know there are some services that can still create transcripts of Twitter chats, although most of them have difficulty catching all the tweets, and if they do, there’s no organization other than to show them in a stream as they happened.

So there is a HUGE demand for transcripts and transcripts that can easily be organized and searchable.  Because let’s face it, if you are trying to sort through 5,000 #Blogchat tweets, you need a way to organize the information and track the conversations as they happened.

I think if a company came up with a way to create a killer Twitter chat transcript tool, that they could totally sell transcripts.  I sent the tweet out tonight asking if people would pay say $3 for a great transcripts, and dozens of people said they would.  I didn’t see anyone say they wouldn’t.  When you think that in #Blogchat alone there are 1,000 or so active participants in a good week, and likely at least that many lurkers, you are looking at least a couple of thousand potential customers.  And I could even see where a company could sign an agreement with chats to become the ‘official’ transcript for that chat.  If a great product/transcript was available, it could quickly corner the market and easily generate several thousand dollars a week in sales.

What the transcript would need is:

  • Be searchable.  By keyword, Twitter user, etc.
  • Be portable so I could use it on my iPad, or Kindle, whatever.  Maybe PDF form or something else.
  • Have a ‘conversation view’ or something similar where I could chose to have the tweets organized by conversations.  It is almost impossible to track conversations when tweets are spaced out in a convo every 5 mins, and there’s 300 new tweets a minute.

Those are some ideas.  If someone was going to charge you say $5 for the PERFECT #Blogchat transcript, what would it have to have in order for you to buy it?  What’s missing?

And to clarify, I am NOT looking to sell #Blogchat transcripts.  I have no idea how to even create them.  I am trying to get a discussion started to show companies that there is potential to this idea.  Do you think there is?

 

UPDATE: Great discussion in the comments, but I think Fred may have come up with the perfect solution – “Hey Mack. I think your idea is in the right direction, but as several (like Shannon Whitley @swhitley, Rick Stilwell @RickCaffeinated and Debra Ellis @Debra_Ellis) pointed out, there are some potential legal and “do I want to contribute to a discussion that somebody else monetizes” issues that need to be overcome (ironically, you don’t own your own tweets – twitter does).

Personally, I’d look to solve this problem from a slightly different angle – rather than sell chat transcripts, I’d look to develop an independent app for “personal use only, running on my own personal device” that provided the type of functions you listed for any chat/search/etc.

Think of it as a “twitter-mining” tool. That, to me, would have significant value and possibly avoid the personal and legal pitfalls of an entity trying to sell Twitter content.”