Screen Grab from ENGAGEMENTdb Report

Brands are worth billions of dollars to companies, and companies will go to great lengths to protect them offline and online. Type the name of a brand on Google, and your first result is certainly going to be the website of the company who owns it.  The same can’t be said when you search for a brand on Twitter.

No question Twitter is gaining corporate acceptance.  A new Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital Media analysis found that in 2009, Twitter surpassed blogging as the social media platform of choice — at least among the Fortune 100.  Or take Charlene Li’s ENGAGEMENTdb analysis of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. The most engaged brands like Starbucks, SAP, Toyota and Dell are using it with great success.

At the same time, in searching for the 100 most valuable brands on Twitter, I found roughly 75 percent don’t appear to own the Twitter page that bears their brand name.  And for some of those that do like @thomsonreuters and @amazon, the pages seem generic or worse like @colgate under lock and key. (The words “Welcome to the World of Colgate-Palmolive” don’t seem very welcoming.)

Take McDonalds for example. The top search on Google is, no surprise, a link to the company’s official website. Now type in @McDonalds on Twitter or “Twitter McDonalds” on Google.  Here are the results.

Perhaps we are just in the early stages of Twitter. In time I am sure that will change.  That seems to be the case with Facebook, where increasingly brands are taking ownership of their unofficial pages. And I should add most companies have Twitter sites with some variation of their brand like @BlackBerryCool and @DellOutlet.

Branding Your Twitter: Top Brand Best Practices

How important is branding?  I think a great deal.  Consider @sony. Its page is so generic that @8bitjoystick asked if it was the official Twitter page for Sony.

The cost to make a branded Twitter site seems nominal compared to the $200,000 plus I have read it costs to create a dedicated YouTube Channel.

So which top 100 brands have taken the time to brand their page and provide added utility?

I like the look of @MTV’s background.  They have made the page consistent with its followers.  So has Accenture.  @accenture reinforces the company’s traditional advertising.  @Toyota is not very elaborate, but I like how they lay out other links and identify their Twitter team. At least, @Ford shows their cars.

In the end, I know content and the level of engagement are far more important than the look and feel of your Twitter page. Comcast hasn’t suffered with an @comcast Twitter page out there.  Especially when you have a wildly successful @Comcastcares page.  But as Twitter takes off, we may find brands going after rogue pages more aggressively.

Let me get back to you.

The list below summarizes tools that analyze influencers or popularity, evaluate sentiment or number of mentions, identify the location of the person tweeting, offer trend analysis or focus on time frames. I marked an “X” in the category that I perceive is the tool’s primary utility. That is not to say that each tool doesn’t do other things.  Also as an aside, I personally don’t like the idea of sharing my Twitter password with a third party.  You will need to decide whether you want to share yours with tools like Twitstat and Twitterank.

This list is not exhaustive, but it may be helpful in trying to manage the deluge of daily tweets. (Please use the comments section for suggested additions and changes.)

As Pete Fasano and I have discussed, no tool appears to be the holy grail incorporating all these features. I for one want a tool that pulls tweets around your key word  search and ranks them by sentiment, influencer, and location.  I want trend analysis, not just a list of tweets, and I want real time data.   I was reminded of a comment that Anna B made in a post in ReadWriteWeb:

I have worked at several agencies working to put together budding social media practices, and have been pitched by many of the social media monitoring tools. I totally buy the concept– the ability to “listen-in” on consumers in their native space. The challenge I find is that none of the offerings provide the total package.

Some key things on her wish list:

• Efficient filtering of queries (most important, and often very poorly done)
• Sentiment analysis
• Sentiment plus (point in time, trend over time, compared w/ competitor, overlay w/ another issue etc.)
• Identification and targeting of influencers
• Ranking of “influential” or popular posts
• Comparison to competitive information
• Identification of “themes” within the conversation
• Easy, dynamic ability to chart and graph analysis of queries
• Self-service set up of queries (not a week or more lead time with “Customer Service”)
• Backward trending (and not just for 30 days!)

Of course all these tools may become obsolete if Twitter builds a version that incorporates these features.

Some of the source material came from  Spacefruit at HubPages, GreyReview and Measurementcamp. A big thanks to Mike Schinkel for giving me a basic HTML class despite a pounding sinus headache.

They say Twitter is replacing blogs, but still here is some love link to some of the Twitter blogs out there: Klout, Tweetburner, Tweetmeme, TweetScan, Twitalyzer.com, TwitterFriends, TwitterGrader, Twitterank, and Twitturly. These blogs can provide more information about the applications listed above.

Let me get back to you.