Twitter and CitySearch: Local Business Tweets
I saw in MediaPost this morning that CitySearch was going to begin integrating Twitter streams into their business listing profiles, which is a fantastic idea.
Back in April of this year Local Search News did a great piece on the local business opportunity for Twitter and it seems that this is the first big announcement I’ve seen yet in that direction.
What does the integration of Twitter on CitySearch include? Well business will be able to include an existing Twitter account, or create a new business specific account, through their CitySearch profile set up. Once set up:
• Consumer will see a stream of recent tweets related to the business posted with a one minute delay to the web…. sandwiched between the original editorial and consumer reviews on the business profile page.
• Consumers will have the option to look at the full listing of the last 100 tweets related to that businesses twitter name
• A new feature on its way will pull out common words from tweets for a particular business in order to synthesize the sentiment or common themes without users having to read through hundreds of tweets.
• The fresh ‘content’ also has the potential to boost the visibility of the CitySearch profile pages among search engines.
This seems like a great move for both sides. As a leader in its field CitySearch is always looking for new ways to offer more and more information and tools to its users, and Twitter provides a unique new real time supplement to the longer form reviews that currently help make CitySearch stand out. Is a restaurant packed tonight, or did Madonna just show up? The existing web reviews system just wasn’t a good solution for that, but Twitter is.
For Twitter this is a significant move into the arena of potentially useful commercial applications of their technology with the leader in the online city guide market.
It will be interesting to see how successful the filtering and parsing technology works… from my experience there are a few gem tweets in a stream, but often a huge number of largely useless tweets as well, if not downright spam, so helping filter through and letting the genuine and useful ones raise to the top may be key to its usefulness.
While there is no specific location technology at work here, everything about this deal speaks to creating place specific digital information, which is likely to be largely created by and for folks directly in the vicinity of the place. In fact, if there is an algorithm helping to control what tweets are shown, I would hope that they seriously consider factoring into the equation the physical proximity of where the tweet was created in order to give more weight to those actually at the location.
I think that this may take six months of fine tuning, but I think it has the potential to be a huge hit.
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