The PeC Review: Tinker Sorts Your Twitter Tweets for Brand-Safe Marketing

Tinker sorts and organizes Twitter.com tweets around brands, products, and other topics or events. This potentially gives ecommerce businesses a new, brand-safe way to market via social media and a means of monitoring popular trends.

Tinker allows users to create so-called events based on conferences, people, or keywords and then aggregates Twitter.com tweets in to event feeds. Once created, other Tinker users can follow events just like Twits follow tweets on Twitter.com.

Each week “The PeC Review” identifies products or services that have the potential to improve an online merchant’s business. My goal is to both rate and point out these products, and this week I decided to “tinker” around in social media. What I found at Tinker.com has a lot of potential for ecommerce business operators, earning the service four out of a possible five stars in this “The PeC Review.”

The Power Behind Brand Chatter

Social media users microblog on Twitter about what they’re doing, reading, eating, experiencing, and consuming, and if we zero in on the portion of the chatter that includes making purchases online or discussions about the products that folks want, we find ourselves in the brand/ecommerce chatter stream.

In this stream lots of consumers have lots to say about products and purchases—some of it good and some of it bad. To use this word-of-mouth, brand chatter stream many marketers have tried to brave the Twitter/Facebook wilds, with varying degrees of success.

Examples include Woot.com (with more than 630,000 twits following it), Amazon on Twitter, and the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on Facebook.

Tinker Filters the Chatter

Tinker promises to take all of that brand/ecommerce chatter and organize it around news, topics, or events, potentially giving marketers a way to conduct brand-safe (because of the filtering capabilities) social media promotion options.

At its core Tinker is very simple, which in my opinion is why it has the potential to succeed.

Tinker Widget Brings Streams to Your Site

Ecommerce merchants that are able to make a go of using Tinker can use a free widget to embed a stream directly on site. I mention this feature, but I am not completely sure that I think it is a great idea. Time will tell.

Trend Tracking

Tinker also offers some trend tracking capabilities. Essentially, the service measures the number of followers and posts a particular stream has. While the validity of this data has yet to be determined it is clear that marketers can use this information to follow trends in the social media space.

Summing Up

Tinker is a great way to safely experiment in social media marketing, which is why it earned four out of five stars in this the “The PeC Review”.