There is a huge amount of information being churned out by Twitter users. Many of the messages are casual, informal communications that you might want to know about. I’ve already mentioned how you can use Google’s Update search to narrow your keyword search by geographic location.
Visitmix has released a desktop client called Archivist. You can run a search within the Archivist to retrieve Twitter results related to your keywords: client or opposing party, corporate executives. The search is not that unusual, although the results are nicely displayed. The feature that really helps the researcher is the ability to export your search results to a tab-separated text file, which you can open in Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheets.
A comment was left by Shaunna Mireau but I accidentally deleted it. She asked if I had any thoughts about the Visitmix Web version of Archivist at http://archivist.visitmix.com (the post above is about the desktop version). Sorry about that, Shaunna!
I like the look of the dashboard that the Web version offers when you run a search, but I’m not sure that the data points are that valuable. For example, a search on a corporation may bring back a lot of messages but unless it was a conversation between people, the metrics may not be helpful. 100 people tweeted once each about Super Mondo Construction will show a pie chart with 100 slices of equally sized pie. If I have date/time/user information in the exported spreadsheet, I can sort just as easily on my own if it matters.
Except for the dashboard, they seem to be about the same. Since you have to have a Twitter account to use the Web version, but you don’t for the desktop client, the latter may be a better option for researchers just interested in grabbing the Tweets and being able to manipulate them in a spreadsheet.