Last week was incredibly busy, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Shotput Ventures’ Demo Day.  The room was packed full of people from Atlanta’s startup community interested to hear from Shotput Ventures’ inaugural class of companies.  An accelerator micro-fund to mentor and invest in pre-formation web companies, Shotput Ventures invests $5,000 per team and $5,000 per founder as part of a coordinated program.

No surprise, most of the companies focused on social media applications. The presentations were very impressive.  Several of the companies were Atlanta based, but the majority were from out of state.  Here are Lance Weatherby’s favorites. 

The inevitable question is whether the Shotput Ventures should only fund Atlanta companies to help our startup community thrive.  While the point is compelling, it can also be argued that Shotput Ventures is helping put Atlanta on map for companies who may have never had considered relocating here.  While I think Atlanta companies should get priority, it would be a mistake to exclude worthy companies based on location.

Let me get back to you.

Some of the presenting companies

Ninja Post

Looxii

KHU.SH

EventHive

ShoutNow

SocialGuides

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Well I joined the Twitter land grab. Ho-Sheng Hsiao, Adam Dill, and I are building a Twitter application that will help PR and marketing professionals. (And we want your feedback.) Mike Schinkel has been advising on the project.

Adam is an expert in data reduction and analytical modeling. Ho-Sheng is an expert in Ruby/Merb/Rails & product deployment.  Mike is an expert in database design and programming. Me – well I’m the PR guy.  We all have regular jobs, but we see an opportunity with the Twitter API to make an impact.

Based on a conversation I had with Scott Burkett, our application takes advantage of Twitter’s immediacy. Think of it as an early warning system. It helps you make sense of the sheer volume of tweets out there. Our application provides a distribution of other words that appear along with your key search term.  As a result, you can see which topics are emerging or gaining momentum around your brand or company.  

Another promising feature measures the influence of the person tweeting.  PR is about building relationships.  We care about what is being said and how.  But we also want to reach those who influence others.  This tool helps us identify the most influential.

More than a monitoring tool, our app is intended to help you organize and prioritize.  We we are trying to facilitate actionable intelligence that is necessary to ward off a crisis or capitalize on an opportunity. By the time an emerging Twitter trend hits Google’s top search results, it may be too late.

We looked at many other Twitter apps.  We think there is an opening for a tool that  analyzes key terms as well as the level of influence and location of the person tweeting.  There is no tool that combines all-in-one functionality that PR and marketing need.  

Anna B, at Organic, Inc said in best in her comments to Marshall Kirkpatrick’s The Future of Social Marketing posting.

“My biggest pet peeve is that most of these tools still return a high volume of JUNK that takes a long time to sift through to get to the golden nuggets…Many [of them] have some interesting functionality. I haven’t found one yet that is the total package.”

Soliciting Feedback

Right now we are soliciting feedback.  We know our application is still rough.  It takes too long to deliver results.  (We can’t request mltiple profiles at one time.)  Currently, we only give data for the most recent 100 tweets for any key word, but we could deliver over 1000 at a time.  

We would like to hear from you on what works, what doesn’t, and what we can add.   The tool can be customized to meet your particular needs. 

To be sure, we are at the mercy of Twitter.  Thcy control the shots and can change the rules at their discretion. We know that we are not alone.  Competition is fierce.  Each day it seems a new Twitter application comes out.  We knew that going in, but we believe we can make money from our version of actionable intelligence.

Let me get back to you.

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