While surfing the net I stumbled upon Twitters election 2008 site. On the site it is possible to see all the Twitter posts that have something to do with the presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain.

In my opinion that seems like the perfect testing ground for a very relevant business model. Imagine companies paying Twitter for each key word they want to see Twitter-posts about.

An example could be a computer manufacturer that used the service to monitor people’s perception of their brand. I am sure that a lot of people are twittering about Apple’s announcement of their new product line right now and that information would be worth a lot. But that is only one use. You could also buy your competitor’s product names as keywords. That would be an excellent way to know more about your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.

Of course there are some moral issues with the solution. People do generally not want companies to “spy on” them. That issue could be solved by communicating the advantages for the consumers, because there are advantages to them as well. Consumers could be interested in having this direct line to the company they have an opinion about. If people do not want companies to listen to their twittering, they could just have the opinion to turn it off. But again… if it is communicated the right way people should be able to see the advantages. After all they use Twitter because the want to be listened to. Why not let more relevant companies listen? In that way Twitter also will avoid some of the bad publicity Facebook received because they collected information about the users.

The service would not be for every company. It would mostly be B2C companies, since these are the companies that most often have an impact on people’s everyday life. But for a lot of companies it would be relevant to know what and if people are Twittering about them.