1. Order taking – Twitter can be easily extended by businesses as an order desk.  Create an ID especially for booking orders for your products and services.  Use any of the desktop Twitter tools or, even better, use one of the available mobile applications to track orders.  No need to employ someone to manage your order desk 24/7.

Who is doing this: The Coffee Groundz that started booking orders on Twitter in 2008.

2. Polls and Surveys – Use Twitter for getting people’s opinion on your business and activities by letting them poll or participate in surveys.  You can use PollDaddy’s twitter polls which is a free service or twtpoll which is a paid service but provides advanced options.

Who is doing this: CNET, CNN, Yahoo, United Airlines to name a few.

3. Emotional Intelligence – Twitter users often share their experience, feedback and opinions about products and service they use.  Businesses can now track what is being shared about them on Twitter without spending a fortune.  There are free tools like TwitScoop and TweetBeep for tracking tweets that mention your brand.

Here is the result when I searched for Dell.

An extreme form of emotion expressed on Twitter is Unfollowing someone.  If you are already using Twitter for your business and want to know which of your messages made you lose existing followers, you can use TweetEffect that tracks the change in the number of your followers with every Tweet.  Good tool to measure the impact of your tweets.

Who is doing this: Actually anyone can do this and you can gather emotional intelligence not just about yourself but others also.  For example, using TweetEffect, I tracked the changes in President Obama’s followership and found some interesting relationships between the Tweets and followership that you can see in the images above.

4. Customer Service – Another area where Twitter can be very useful.  Provide a Twitter address where customers can send you a direct message whenever they need help with your products and services.  Track and respond to customer queries and support requests through any of the free Twitter management tools.

Who is doing this: I know of Comcast and JetBlue.  Please let us know through comments if you know anyone else.

5. Competition Analysis – Want to know what your competition is doing, what is the buzz about your competitor on the Internet, what are some of the areas that have your competitor’s customers unhappy and so on.  You can track all these things through Twitter.

Use TwitterStats and TweetVolume to find out how many times people mention your brand and your competitor’s.  These two only provide quantitative analysis.  If you are looking for qualitative comparison, you will need to make use TwitScoop and TweetBeep.

Who is doing this: Anyone, just that nobody wants to do it publicly and that’s why I don’t know of any name.

6. News, Announcements and PR – No need to hire an expensive PR agency to announce and distribute your company’s news.  Use Twitter to distribute news and make announcements.  Send a message to @MicroPR and it will be distributed to all the media professionals and bloggers who follow them.  You can also use #Twitpitch hash tag to pitch your company, product or service.

Who is doing this: Google uses Twitter to share the news stories and important announcements related to all its products and services.  Dell also shares announcements @Direct2Dell.

7. Raising capital and donations – This is something that most non-profits can make use.  I am not too sure of the legal issues involved in companies pitching for private investments through Twitter but know of at least one example of such request.  Jason Goldberg, the founder of Social Median, that was recently acquired by Xing, posted a message on Twitter soliciting angel investment.

8. Hiring Talent – If you are looking for talented people to join your business, chances are you will find them on Twitter.  Just post your requirement as a tweet and you may end up getting references from your followers or direct messages from interested parties.

Who is doing this: Sodexo USA, a company involved in food service and facilities management has a dedicated Twitter account named Sodexo Careers.

9. Special Offers, Discounts and Coupons – Use Twitter to notify people of discounts that you are offering without advertising costs.  If you wish to provide coupons to your customers, use twtQpon to create and distribute discount coupons.

Who is doing this: Dell Outlet offers deals and discounts through Twitter.

10. Manage company events – Want to invite people to your company’s event or a webinar.  Use Twitter to promote your event.  In case you want to be more organized, use CalTweet or VeVite.  These tools allow you to set up an event on Twitter, invite guests and have RSVP responses mailed to you.

Know of any other areas where businesses can save money using Twitter for managing their activities, please care to share.

If you want to be updated about more such posts and interesting small business ideas, please follow B.E.T.A. Daily on Twitter.

To demonstrate the feature, I have picked up the most obvious topic for the day – new year celebrations and see the results in the image below:

It is a great new feature by Google and clearly shows that Google is taking the real time web seriously and also Bing!

FlixPulse uses automated filters as well as human moderators to to classify Twitter messages as positive, negative and indifferent reviews about movies.  This information is then put into a visual format which is nice to look at.

Head on to FlixPulse to find out how your favorite movie is doing amongst Twitter users.

The new service collects licensed Twitter content from select Twitter users and then uses its to aggregate and deliver to distributors and enterprises in real time using its own technology as well as human editors.  The service in essence will be a press release service using Twitter.software.

Though not much information has been provided on the site, I can see various uses of this service like a news site can actually make use of news content delivered through NewsTwits for its users.  Since a lot of journalist population uses Twitter, along with citizen journalists, it can be rich source of information.

If you go to tweetshots home page, the first impression that you will have is ‘how do I actually take a screenshot’ as there is no help information available on the page and the interface is non-intuitive.  I don’t know why people make so confusing to find out how their service works.

So here’s how to take screenshots of Twitter tweets using tweetshots.  Go to the home page and enter your bookmarklet name in the defined box.  You don’t have to do anything with “What am I doing?” box and pressing the “tweetshots” button didn’t work at my end.

After entering the name, drag the bookmarklet link to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

Now open any page containing a single twitter update like this and click on the bookmarklet.  On the nest screen, click the “Grab the tweetshot” link to create the screenshot.

On the next screen, you will see the screenshot along with the embed code and link to post the screenshot to Tumblr.

Go ahead and create your Twitter screenshots.

TweetWheel is another entrant in this space and it lets you find out who all amongst friends of a Twitter user know each other in common.  All you need to do is enter the Twitter user name and TweetWheel does the rest.

The application is hosted on Google Apps Engine and is relatively slow.  I only have 9 friends on Twitter still I kept getting a message stating that Twitter is responding slowly.  I can imagine what will happen to Robert Scoble if he uses this tool.  Twitter can be slow and non-responsive at times but I think it is Google Apps Engine which is the culprit in case of TweetWheel.

Coming to the visualization, TweetWheel displays all the friends in the form of a wheel and you can hover on friend’s name to see who all are they connected with.  This application can be very useful for getting to know and introduced to people who your friends connect with just like Linkedin which shows how are you connected with a person; but, for that a lot of enhancements still need to be made to TweetWheel.

TwittEarth is using Papervision 3D engine for the 3D Earth model and Yahoo Local API for geo-coding the location of the Twitter updates along with Twitter API for accessing the public timeline.

Though TwittEarth does not offer much apart from the ability to update your status from its interface, it is a nice to look at website when you have some free time.  The avatars used by TwittEarth are great and the overall experience is nice.

People accessing Twitter from Dubai are getting a message that the site has been blocked because of its content is not consistent with religious, cultural, political and moral values of United Arab Emirates.

I do not see any point in banning a communication service like Twitter.  I agree that the content on some of the websites with user generated content can be inconsistent (to a certain extent only) with values and culture of few nations but Twitter does not  come into that category.

If Dubai can block Twitter, they might as well ban emails and IMs.  Twitter is just a more viral version of email and IM which reaches out to more people in a shorter duration of time.

Let’s see which service will be the next victim of Internet censorship.  It’s time now that some governing organization to be formed which should take care of freedom of Internet and raise voice against Internet censorship.  I love to hate these censorship agencies.

Now, we also have a not so good use of Web 2.0 in the form of a video posted on YouTube by Tricia Walsh-Smith, wife of Shubert Organization’s president Philip Smith. The video titled “One More Crazy Day in the Life of a Phoenix Rising From the Ashes” shows Tricia trashing her elderly husband with a list of nasty accusations involving sex and porn. The video is NSFW so be careful.

In the video, the former actress who is 25 years younger than her husband, Tricia talks about how Philip Smith is trying to evict her from their Manhattan residence in the next 30 days because of a clause in their prenuptial agreement.

I feel that the mediums like YouTube and Twitter are great for voicing your concerns and problems like the U.C. Berkeley student got saved using Twitter. The way this video has been made is like washing your linen in public. If Tricia wanted to put this out in public for gathering their support, there could have been a softer version of the video. But then, it wouldn’t have intrigued people so much.

Xobni – Organize Your Inbox

Xobni, which is in invite-only beta at the moment, is a great plug-in to organize your inbox and discover the social network hidden in your emails.  It saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments.

By clicking on any mail you can see the sender’s full communication history including past conversations, attachments, contact details and find out who do you know in common based on your email conversations.  Xobni also has a fast email search feature and provides various ways of navigating your mailbox.

I have 5 invites for Xobni left with me.  If you want the invite, please leave a comment along with a message "I want Xobni invite."  The first five to comment along with the message will be sent the invite.

OutSync – Assign Facebook Friends’ Photos To Outlook Contacts

OutSync let you organize your contacts using photos so that you don’t have to think whom that email address belongs to.  OutSync lets you sync up photos between Facebook and Outlook.

If you are using ActiveSync to sync your mobile and Outlook, the photo assigned to a contact using OutSync will appear on your mobile phone screen when you receive a call from your Outlook contact.

OutTwit – Use Twitter from Outlook

If you are a Twitter fan and does not want toggle between Outlook and Twitter windows, you can use OutTwit.  OutTwit connects Outlook with Twitter so that you can update your Twitter status from Outlook and receive your friends’ Twitters status updates as incoming email messages.

The messages show up in a sub-folder called "Twitter Messages" and you can assign custom categories to new messages.  OutTwit also lets you configure the time interval for checking new updates, shorten URLs with tinyurl and manage and search the Twitter updates just like email.

Microsoft Outlook SMS Add-in – Send SMS Using Outlook

The SMS add-in for Outlook works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 and lets you send SMS text messages through most of the GMS mobile phones connected to your PC or laptop.  Once you have installed the add-in and connected your mobile phone to your computer via Infrared, Bluetooth or a USB cable, you can start using it without any other kind of download or any special type of subscription from your mobile service provider.

Using this add-in, you can draft an SMS, save the draft, send it to individuals or groups, print the SMS and forward the message as SMS or email.  The add-in also looks up your Outlook contacts for phone numbers and enables you to use spellcheck for the SMS.

If you are using Outlook 2007, there is another service which lets you send SMS using Outlook named SMS officer.  Amit from Digital Inspiration has written a detailed post on using SMS Officer.  This service has a free trial of 10 SMS after which you will have to buy SMS plans.

intraVnews – Feed Reader inside Outlook

The intraVnews plug-in turn your Outlook into a feed reader using which you can read RSS and Atom feeds in Microsoft Outlook XP or 2003.  You can choose to display the content in Description mode, HTML mode or both.  The plug-in works in the background for fetching new feed items and alerts you for the new items through a pop-up balloon.

The plug-in allows you to manage the feed items like email and allows for searching, grouping, viewing and filtering feed items. 

Skype Toolbar

The Skype Toolbar for Outlook lets you see when your Skype contacts are online, call Skype Names as well as the phone numbers listed in your emails, add a Skype call button in your outgoing mail’s signature enabling people to call you with just a click, switch to instant messaging in follow up to emails and send money using PayPal to your Skype contacts.

The toolbar and Skype calls are free; however, the calls to mobile and fixed phones are charged as per normal Skype rates.

Linkedin Toolbar

The free toolbar from Linkedin lets you view the email sender’s Linkedin mini-profile, search your Linkedin network from Outlook, send Linkedin invitations to contacts from Outlook, upload Outlook contacts to Linkedin and create new Outlook contact records just by highlighting the contact information in emails.

It also provides updates about any changes in the profiles of your Linkedin connections and even recommends contacts to be invited to Linkedin based on your email history.

Google Desktop Outlook Toolbar

Bring the goodness of Google search to your inbox with the Google Desktop Search’s Outlook toolbar.  It is faster than the in-built Outlook search and has the accuracy and relevance of Google search results.

The search results are displayed in native Outlook list view with all your selected columns which you can then sort by clicking on the column headers.

Plaxo Toolbar

The Plaxo toolbar for Outlook lets you sync your existing Plaxo Address Book to your Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express Address Book.  It keeps your Plaxo address book updated with any changes in your contacts automatically.

Apart from Outlook sync, it has other features which include looking up the contact’s Pulse profile and the ability to sync your Linkedin contacts.

WaxMail – Talk into email with WaxMail

With WaxMail plugin for Outlook, you can record voice messages and embed them in the body of an email.  You just need to have a microphone and of course Outlook to record your message.

The recorded messages are attached to the email as MP3 files which can be played by the recipient to listen to the messages.

CircleUp Toolbar

Create and send new CircleUps from directly from Outlook using your Outlook contacts, see the status of CircleUps sent and received, search for your own past CircleUps as well as the public ones, and monitor responses in real-time through an integrated RSS feed in Outlook 2007.

For the benefit of those who are not aware of the CircleUp functionality, CircleUp is a great service which lets you collect information from a group and see and share consolidated results instead of looking at individual responses.  Learn more about CircleUp.

Live Search Maps Add-In

The Live Search Map add-in for Outlook lets you add maps and directions to the meeting requests while sending it to the attendees, calculate travel distance and estimate travel time between locations, add meeting reminders with estimated travel time blocked in the calendar.

You can see the maps in various types of views like 3D, aerial, raod, bird’s eye etc., print map and directions and even save the details for viewing offline.

If you found this list useful, don’t forget to share the goodness with everyone.