Life can be fairly unpredictable and so can business. Sometimes you find yourself confronted with a totally unexpected shift in circumstances and you need to be fast on deciding where you want to go and you must always rely on your perceptions more than anything else. In the end we are dealing with people all the time and the better you can understand where people are going and what are they really thinking, the better you can cope with any given situation.

One tool that will come to your support in this regard is Twitter. Some people love it and some people hate it, but there is one objective value in it in addition to building a community: its search engine allows you to keep track of what people think and say about a specific topic or what are the hottest topics of the moment.

You just access the search.twitter.com and you can have a look and what are the most discussed issues, then you can dive into the conversations happening about these various topics and find out what is going on. Some of the messages that go back and forth are meaningless therefore expect to spend some time in sieving through the “noise” before getting to the golden nuggets. What is remarkable about Twitter search feature is that you can also look for a specific emotional coloring of the messages or for a specific semantic structure, like questions and exclamations.

You can even check for Tweets that where sent from a specific location or within a distance from that location. Let’s make an example, I want to know who is looking for houses in Clearwater, the I type search house near:clearwater. For the positive or negative structure you can look for the smiling simbol or the opposite and you can combine this element with other keywords. The semantic side of it can be performed by looking for a question mark (?) or for an exclamation mark (!).

You also have a very valuable tool in the so called discussions hastags, for example #nowplaying for indicating the some music people are listening (this is by the way the top trending topic at the moment I am writing). You can also track specifically public messages sent between two specific persons, therefore if you have two competitors you want to monitor specifically, you can, within the boundaries of what they will state publicly of course.

It’s an interesting tool that gives you information you would never be able to find on Google because they pertain to what is happening between at a certain moment, which you can select, on a specific subject or near a particular location. Just to give an example, I have done some searches about what people were saying on International Real Estate and I found some tweets talking about a report produced by the National Association of Realtors about international real estate transactions in Maine and following that track I found much more relevant information.

It is like having a human screen for you the most relevant results from a Google query and giving you the results so that you can drill deeper. And I close with a quote from “The Art Of Money Getting” by P.T. Barnum which is the golden rule number 9 on how to make money: “Let Home predominate, but be not too visionary”. In short, research your job before you jump into it and avoid following any new avenue just because it is promising.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. if you want to find more about this subject go to this article.