I recently came across Tweetscan, which allows you to search Twitter postings for keywords or phrases. Why would you want to do this? Because people “Tweet” about your product, your company, you, and not just about the fact that they’re on their way to the bathroom, or feeling really hungry, or about to go to bed, or whatever. And although you’ve probably figured out by now how to search blogs and the news sites (thank you Google), you probably hadn’t figured out (or even realised that you needed to figure out) how to search Twitter.

I did a search for the name of the company I work for, Ovum, which yielded mixed results. Some of the hits were definitely about the company and were therefore relevant, while about the same amount were about something or other to do with a human egg going through the process of fertilization. (Note to anyone thinking about naming their company after a biological term: please don’t - bad idea, and not just because of the Google searches.)

But at any rate, it’s a useful tool when it works. I’ve seen posts quoting Ovum research, people pointing out news about Ovum, even one of our editors saying that we’re desperately trying to hire more of them. The best thing about Tweetscan, though, is that you can set it up as an RSS feed. So instead of obsessively checking once a day or once a week to see if there’s anything recent (or more likely, forgetting to check for weeks on end only to find out that someone slandered you last month and it’s all over the web already), you can simply subscribe to the feed for your search, and then check it along with the rest of what’s in your RSS reader. Nifty stuff.

I’ve had it set up in my Google Reader subscriptions for a couple of weeks now and there’s been something in there at least every couple of days. Apart from anything else, it’s been a fascinating way of telling which other Ovum employees use Twitter, and which other people that work with Ovum do as well. I highly recommend it. Summize is another service which offers some similar features.