In my (apparently) ongoing series of articles on mashing up Dynamics CRM with various web applications, here’s the latest installment: Twitter. You might be familiar with the technique: using a little client-side scripting to update the src property of an IFRAME. I’ve illustrated it before in a some  different contexts – here are three:

·         Search SharePoint 2007 for information related to a CRM Account record

·         Display a Google map for a CRM Contact or Account record

·         For one of your Account records, which of their associated Contacts are on LinkedIn and where are their profile pages?

Here’s a brief backgrounder on Twitter, and why you might want to extend your Dynamics CRM with Twitter search results.

What’s all this Twitter stuff, anyway?

Twitter is one of the fastest growing of the so-called Web 2.0 applications. If you haven’t used it, it’s easy to characterize it as a narcissistic exercise in time wasting. Who but my Mom would really care to know what I’m doing at random times throughout the day, anyway, especially if I’m always tweeting (a Twitter version of a post) “just got back from a movie”, or “going into the kitchen to get some OJ”? There are a lot of people on Twitter. Just how many is open to debate, so visit this site if you’re interested.

In any case, once you start using it, you start to appreciate the real business value it can have. Twitter is essentially a broadcast medium. Any tweet can be searched, and if I find an interesting tweeter (twitterer?) I can “follow” that person. Someone else can follow me. When I follow someone, I can see a history of their tweets from my Twitter home page, and I can (optionally) configure it so that for certain people I’m following, their tweets get sent to my phone or mobile device. So how can you use it for your business?

1.       Think of who might be following you, and push out an announcement to all of them at the same time. People who follow me might be interested in CRM training, so when I got locked in dates for an upcoming CRM training roadshow I’m doing with United Training, I tweeted out with a link to the landing and registration pages.

2.       If you have a blog, Twitter’s a great way to announce a new post to your network. The 140 character maximum tweet length includes the URL, so you’re forced to be brief. For me, at least, this makes me feel a little less like I’m wasting peoples’ time, so I’ll always tweet out a new post.

3.       Tweet a question to your network. OK, I haven’t actually done this very much, but anecdotal evidence tells me it’s effective.

4.       Find people who have valuable things to say on topics you care about, and follow them. From what I can tell so far, about 90% of the people I’m interested in following include links to their recent blog posts and other more detailed content in their tweets, so don’t make the mistake of thinking what you can learn from Twitter must be expressible in 140 characters. And just think: there’s always a chance, however slim, that you really will learn something that will change your life within the 140 character limit! How awesome would that be?

These are just some specific examples, but for me so far, the two most compelling Big Reasons to use Twitter are that I can promote myself and my company’s services in an efficient, opt-in format; and that I can learn things from people who have interesting things to say.

Searching Twitter

Before we get to the mashing up part, we have to talk about Twitter search. I don’t claim to be the Twitter Search Zen Master, but I’ve started to appreciate its huge potential. If you’ve ever wanted to know “what everybody’s thinking” about some topic or another, think about Twitter: millions of people, entering 140-character thought-snippets on any topic you can think of … and all of it nice, searchable data! If there really is wisdom in crowds, we should be able to find some of it here.

Here’s your Twitter search primer: http://search.twitter.com/about

The two most important resources linked to from that page are for Twitter search operators and for the Twitter search API.

I’ll summarize them by way of a few examples. To see how these work go to http://search.twitter.com/ and enter the search phrase, verbatim, in the search box.

Then you can extend this a little bit by turning the URL into an RSS feed. Add the text “atom” (a popular RSS feed format) after the second “search”, and you can turn any of these into an RSS feed. RSS feeds are XML data, so you can extract useful things like how many posts are returned, and other very interesting aggregate data.

So, this URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22oreo+cakesters%22 starts to return some data a Kraft product manager should be interested in!

Oh, and don’t forget to add a smiley-face on the end of a search to return only positive tweets and a to return negatives. So if you want to know whether they like your cakesters or not, and to what extent, compare

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=oreos%20

with

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=oreos%20

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Twitter search, here’s what’s coming up in part 2: how to extend Dynamics CRM with Twitter search results.