----------Twitterhawk: No Guts, No StoryGuy Kawasaki of How to Change the WorldGuy Kawasaki of How to Change the World |May 27th, 2009 - 12:00 AM(149) found this useful.In a few years, people may read this posting and wonder, “What was Guy worriedabout?” (Remember when Google’s sponsored links were a crime against humanity?)However, in the near future, many people will scream bloody murder that I am goingto ruin Twitter by telling you about a service called Twitterhawk.So be it.Twitterhawk is a “real-time, targeted-marketing tool”—or the ultimate spammachine. First, let me tell you why I’m telling you about it: Because it can helpyou use Twitter as a marketing tool. Second, let me tell you how it works. Youcreate keyword searches like what you can do at Search.Twitter.com. For example:* “Fashionweek”* “Homeschooling”* “SEO” within 50 miles of 94031* “Audi” within 50 miles of 94031Then you compose up to five responses to the tweets that it finds for each searchcondition and schedule the search intervals. An Audi dealer in Palo Alto, forexample, can use this to find sales or maintenance prospects on Twitter.Twitterhawk will then tweet your responses for when it finds the right keywords inthe right area.Essentially this is a way to monitor public conversations for keywords withoutbeing the NSA while Dick Cheney was running things. In other words, this is asgood as it gets for targeted marketing. The closet analogy I can think of is howGmail searches your email and inserts ads based on the words it finds in yourmessages.This is when the panic ensues: “Holy kaw, if many people started usingTwitterhawk, it would mean the death of Twitter as a means of social networkingand communication!” Let me tell you why this isn’t true:1. Twitterhawk charges $.05 for each tweet that it sends. What spammer canafford to pay $.05/tweet in order to ask you to help get money out of Nigeria orto sell you penis-enlargement products? By the way, Twitterhawk tracks how manytimes people clicked on the link, so that you can determine your per click cost.2. There is a blacklist of terms that Twitterhawk will not respond to. I don’tknow what’s on the list, but I suspect words like “the” are probably on it toprevent too many matches.3. There is a limit of twelve fully-automatic tweets per day per search. Atthis rate, it will take a long time to find someone to help get money out ofNigeria or a man who wants to get his aforementioned penis enlarged.4. You cannot send the same person more than one tweet based on the samesearch. This means that the Audi dealer cannot send you a tweet every time youmention the word “Audi.” The dealer gets one shot at you.5. You can edit each outgoing tweet when you set Twitterhawk to manualapproval. This means that you can use Twittehawk to find tweets to respond to andqueue them up for individual answers. (The reason to manually approve each tweetis that you wouldn’t want to send a tweet such as “We’re an Audi dealer located inPalo Alto. We’d love your business,” in response to a tweet like, “I’m so glad I
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