I recommend Marshall Kirkpatrick’s provocative piece on free and premium Twitter accounts. He’s a blogger successfully using Twitter for online journalism. Marshall writes:
Selective group creation, competitive intelligence, business development, sentiment tracking and data mining horizons are just starting to open up on Twitter. It’s a big, dynamic, public, programmatically accessible database of real-time conversation. Would I pay the same monthly fee to access that as I do for telephone service? Hell yeah, I would.
Like Marshall, I believe that competitive intelligence, business development, data mining, and other research-oriented activities can be effectively carried out on Twitter. So much so that forward-thinking companies will pay big bucks for enhanced accounts that peek into this global datastream.
Twitter is a modern-day Bloomberg terminal for conversations and market intelligence.
Marshall is a visionary pioneer who “gets it”. Follow him: @marshallk