TweetDeck Looms to Battle Seesmic, Twitter on Android

In the two years since TweetDeck first launched on the desktop, it has set the standard for multi-functional multi-account Twitter-centric applications, bringing the concept of columns, grouping and integrated search to what had previously been a bland market of simple apps. With the product’s success, we saw the metamorphosis of Seesmic from a video comments company to one that has gone head to head with TweetDeck on practically every screen, even as the two saw focused effort from Loren Brichter on Tweetie pass them by and become the official Twitter application from the microblogging mothership for both the Mac desktop and the iPhone.

Now, the two are competing for visibility on yet another screen – that of the fast-growing Android platform, and unlike previous battles, which usually saw TweetDeck innovating first, it was Seesmic who got there first – in a big way, going live on Android and BlackBerry back in November of 2009. Tomorrow, TweetDeck will officially launch the first iteration of its Android product on the Android Marketplace, and those who prefer it will once again have that choice.Read more at blog.louisgray.com

HOW TO: Pick the Right Social Media Engagement Style

Matthew Latkiewicz works at Zendesk.com, customer support software. He writes for and edits Zengage, Zendesk’s blog about customer engagement. He also writes about wine for McSweeney’s and imagines stuff at his own website, youwillnotbelieve.us.

What’s your customer engagement style? It’s a question reminiscent of those light-hearted quizzes that proliferate magazines: Are you strong or sassy? Independent or group-focused? When someone @-replies you on Twitter (), do you respond immediately or wait a couple days?

These questions are actually important to consider. Why? Because customer engagement encompasses your company’s customer service, support, and marketing. It also deals with your company’s forums, Twitter accounts, blogs and meetups. How various companies use Twitter, YouTube (), Facebook (), and its ilk, goes a long way to define the long-term relationship consumers have with that brand.

There are some amazing success stories. Old Spice, using both Twitter and YouTube, recently ran a customer engagement masterclass that created a much-needed mania around the brand. Yet, for every success story, there are plenty of flops. When a Domino’s Pizza employee uploaded a disastrous video about the company’s hygiene standards to YouTube, a widespread negative viral campaign ensued.

The lesson: Ensure that your engagement style matches your company’s brand, goals, and general attitude. We took a look at the top five engagement styles that currently dominate the social web. Which are you? Read more at mashable.com

Use Twitter to Get a Job: 4 Steps

When it comes to social networks and job-hunting, Twitter trumps Facebook, according to Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0, Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success. “Twitter is the best place because it’s public networking,” says Schawbel. Facebook, meanwhile, is just too personal a space to approach someone you don’t know and with whom you share no friends. “I’d never say to send resumes to hiring managers on Facebook…It’s like infringing on people,” he says.

The second edition of Schawbel’s book comes out in October. It has an extra 60 pages, including a chapter on how to use social networks to land a job.  After another round of disappointing unemployment data Friday morning, I decided to pick his brain for more advice on Twitter to boost your chances of landing a job. Here are four steps.

1. Craft a Specific Network

Make a list of the top three to five companies in specific locations where you’d love to work, says Schawbel. Then head to Twellow.com, a sort of Twitter Yellow Pages that helps you find people based on keywords in their bios. For example, type in “Accounting California” or “Microsoft PR” and Twellow gives you a list of Twitter users who have those keywords in their bios. From there you can narrow down the most appropriate people to follow. Read more at moneywatch.bnet.com

Twitter Users Who Rack Up the Retweets Top Most Influential List

Got a lot of Twitter followers? So what? Unless they’re listening to what you’re saying and actually passing it on, you’re likely not all that influential, according to a new study by HP Labs.

According to the study, “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”

Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman, the director of Hewlett-Packard Labs’ Social Computing Lab, and his team analyzed 22 million tweets over 300 hours in September 2009 in order to concoct what he calls the IP Algorithm, which highlights influential Twitter users by assigning them both a score for influence and passivity.

Passivity is the tendency of many followers to passively peruse tweets without sharing them (i.e. retweeting them) with their network. According to the study, the average Twitter user retweets only one in 318 URLs.

Those Twitter users who are truly influential are able to break through this blase shell and impel their followers to share their tweets with the rest of the Twit-o-sphere. Check out the most influential Twitterers below (Mashable got a mention), as well as the most popular, yet not-so-influential users. Read more at mashable.com

5 Terrific Twitter Mapping Tools

Twitter is undeniably useful as a standalone service, but it becomes so much more fun when you start factoring in all the cool tools and awesome apps available.

We’ve previously brought you various Twitter () visualization services, but now we’re taking a look at mapping tools that work with the microblogging site.

Whether you want to see where you’ve tweeted from in the past, what others around you are saying, or get a global overview of a hashtag, read on for some fun tools that can help. Read more at mashable.com