As social media activity becomes an increasing portion of companies' marketing focus, including finding new clients and tracking company brands or product mentions across the Web, a virtual industry of reputation and analytics firms have sprung up to try and derive value from the noise. A simple application called Abuzz just hit the iTunes store with a goal of making these social media searches simple and mobile. The result is a lightweight client that tracks keywords across multiple outlets and even lets you respond to mentions from within the application.
Abuzz Lets You Set Campaigns and Keywords to Track
Abuzz's interface is very easy to grasp. Start by creating a new campaign (such as a brand name or product), add keywords to that campaign, and choose what communities to monitor. Abuzz comes standard with the ability to search blogs, Digg, forums and Twitter, and you can select to not search any of those communities if you believe they do not drive value.
Select Where to Search and Abuzz Delivers Results
Rather than passively watching the updates stream by, you can click through to any of them, including blog posts, which are displayed within Abuzz, without having to open Safari and exiting the app. Similarly, selecting relevant Tweets puts you into a Twitter stream of sorts. If you have entered your Twitter login information, you can respond to mentions, retweet activity with a single click, tag the content for later viewing, or even e-mail it to an interested party.
Abuzz Even Tracks Twitter Mentions and Messages
While Abuzz isn't trying to replace Tweetie or whatever your favorite Twitter client is on the iPhone, its integrated client is good enough for most tasks. It knows, once you have registered, how to easily discover your mentions on the service, and brings your direct messages to the fore for easy viewing.
Take Action on Tweets From Within Abuzz
The goal of Abuzz is to let you monitor social media sites with saved searches at any time from your iPhone. Today's Twitter clients tend to be heavy on the updating and light on the searching, but Abuzz makes the process all about finding relevant content and keeping it easily accessible. As you can see from my example screenshots, Abuzz makes it easy to track clients or recent companies I have written about to watch for impact. The application is authored by Shawn Farner, who details the app as "social search, plain and simple". You can find Abuzz here.
Disclosure: The application is $2.99 on iTunes. Shawn passed me a free code to review.