PeopleBrowsr Business - for businesses managing social networking


by Mike Hosley
A friend of mine invited me to meet his team after they made an announcement. The Wall Street Journal online, USA today and the Sierra Club had just written them up for the first time. When I walked in I was greeted by a small 20 something group, gathered around a huge monitor, tapping into a 8 inch net book, watching the world tweet about them.

I opened up my laptop and clicked on PeopleBrowsr Business, and in just a few a few seconds I was able to sort the tweets into columns (stacks) by using search, an easy to use method of organizing and sorting tweets from the browser. I started changing the look and feel of the tweets, by changing the display in one click to toggle between grids or streams. Then I widened the stack to full screen to show where the tweets were originating from on a map. More granular results can be displayed in other stacks, sorted by region or concentric circle from a map location, but I had made my point...and moved on to drill down and read some individual tweets.

Since PeopleBrowsr Business is geared toward commercial, it has other useful processes like:
- the ability to create a stack of to do items
- assign a tweet to someone else
- autoreply based on keyword to direct messages

Each stack of results, or column, has a drop down option to view more statistics on the stack, including graphed data displaying the number of posts per hour or per day by keyword, and what other keywords were being used most often along with the search results.

Because PeopleBrowsr uses the Social Graph API, I was able to instantly pull up profiles of individual posters, and get a feel for the tone and quality of the content they had posted on other networks. I could easily rank the search results using tags, comments both public and private, private notes, and by positive and negative sentiment.

Campaigns - Since these on the fly campaigns can be named and saved, it's a real time saver for those that experience "social network fatigue" or are interested in developing reports that reside in the cloud. It works really well for developing automated campaigns based upon search results.

Campaigns can be tweaked with a single check mark to send automated responses or special offers, such as coupons or discount codes automatically based on keyword, direct messages, even pre-set for specific delivery scheduled times...or assigned to other employees for handling as easily as an email. You can easily create a to-do list that appears as a separate stack, or tag and make private comments about a tweet, direct message, email, and has the familiar "Inbox, Outbox" bar along the left side of the screen followed by a useful Assigned to me/by me format to track what's happening in real time.

The current releases of PeopleBrowsr are free and come in Light, Advanced, and the Business version. Business users are able deploy more complex applications in the enterprise by opting for a worldwide network of "coaches" and an ecosystem of "PBexperts" that can offer fee-based training and hands on live support with custom implementations.

The wide audience of early adopters will soon come up with lots of applications for this level of granularity, without dealing with the overhead of storing data or downloading programs. Since you can manage multiple IDs from a single dashboard UI screen, it's ideally suited for businesses large and small that are interested in keeping real time tabs on different departments, employees, or teams cost effectively.