How I use Twitter to make Product Management Easier

The rise of social media has really revolutionized the tools I use for my product management duties. Over the past several months I have been using Twitter to really help make my life a little bit easier. Here's how I use Twitter and related tools:

How I use Twitter

• Listening to your customers - I like to see what our customers or prospects say about us. Do they like our product, are they complaining about a feature, are they happy about a new feature launch, etc. Just watching the tweets helps give me a feel for how some segment of our customers are responding. Often times, I read a tweet and forward it to the appropriate team/person. For example, if someone tweets about the great service they receive, I take a screenshot of the tweet and send it to the support team to give them some kudos.
• Listening to your competitors and their customers - The first thing I did when I installed Tweetdeck (see more in the Tools section below) was to add columns for searches for them and I started to follow them. Now I know when their customers are complaining, when the announce a new feature, what tradeshow or marketing event they are going to, etc. I get to see how their customers are reacting to them and all of this happens in real time. I typically check out tweetdeck on my phone whenever I have a free moment, just to stay on top of it. You have to be careful to not check it too often or it will suck up too much time :)
• Gather Market Data - This is really cool! Before twitter I used Google and it just wasn't effective...It took forever to get through the noise of all the search results. Often times I would click a link and the content wasn't helpful and then have to go back to the search and it just took forever. Now I just add a column in Tweetdeck with some keyword (or hashtag) I am looking for and the research just comes to me! With only 140 characters it is easy to quickly digest the nuggets of information and then find the right content. Because the content comes from people like myself, it is often relevant and helpful.
• Follow the right people - Easier said than done :). Often times I look to follow key employees of my competition, bloggers who seem to have a lot of good information, and of course employees of my current job. I try my best to use this stream of content to help augment my other twitter streams with content that can sometimes provide more context.

Tools

• TweetDeck - This is a great tool of aggregating a lot of twitter content in a customizable fashion. I know folks who use HootSuite which is a great tool as well.  Check it out here.
• TwitterVenn - I played with this tool a couple of times. It was kind of nifty but a bit slow. It provides a venn diagram that shows any overlap between tweets with same terms in them. I would recommend playing with it for a little bit by clicking here.

So if you have noticed I'm not really engaging in a two way conversation with my customers. You might be thinking that takes the "social" out of social media. You would be correct. Depending on your company this may not be desired (some companies have folks whose job it is to monitor and respond to customers). For the time being I just use it to listen and if I find something really useful I can always retweet it.

Thanks and have a happy new year!