Dashboards are all the rage in good web applications these days, so we thought, hey we want one too.  Well…that and we’ve been doing a lot customer development with our favorite business clients.  The question: how can we at SocialGuides help you manage your customer relationships on Twitter better? The answer: by helping us understand Twitter in a context of what matter most to a business.

You see there are lot’s of Twitter clients out there. Some are for power users on their desktops, some are for on the go consumers using their mobile phone, and some have lots of bells and whistles for big fancy enterprise businesses.  But what if you are a small to medium sized business? Well that’s what the SocialGuides dashboard is for. It’s a stripped down Twitter interface for working with just the things that matter most to a business operator - customers.

Our first pass (and trust us there will be lots of refinement) is focused on three things. Monitoring, Engaging and Discovering the conversation you should have with your customers.  So let’s explore:

• Monitoring.  We’re a really proud of this one because we take all of the touch points of your business on Twitter and present them in one single stream.  Say you run our favorite little save the world retail shop called Trade as One.  Well on Twitter you might have said, “hey guys come check out our grand opening”. Or someone might be saying “@tradeasone so when is your grand opening?”. Or Someone else might be saying “I just went to the Trade as One grand opening and fell in love with the company”.  The first is something you said, the second is something someone said directly to you (which you should respond to) and the third is something said about you - not necessarily something you might respond to, but good to know.  We are really excited that there’s one easy place (Hint: SocialGxxx) for you to see all three.
• Engaging. Within our Dashboard you can also post directly to Twitter to respond to all the groovy customers that you’ve discovered from that cool monitoring stuff from above. If it seems easy and straightforward - because it is.  Oh but wait, we added a few bells & whistles because, well, we couldn’t resist.  When the posts go to Twitter they automatically get small little short links that drive them back to your social business listing page.  Which is great because you want customers there (see the cool social listing page post). It also (if there’s room) adds your name and address so if you happen to be reaching out to a new customer, there’s a little context to who you are. Nice.
• Discovering.  We’ve added a panel on the left that shows who you’re top fans are on Twitter.  This is really cool because it helps you discover folks that may be your biggest advocates and you may have never even known the poor souls. It’s all organized by how often someone has mentioned your business on Twitter, which as you might imagine are folks you really want to share the love with.  So you’ll see them listed in order of how often they talk about you, that way you can give them a shout out, a little follow back love, or maybe even a cookie (I mean who doesn’t love cookies?).

As always, we’d love to hear feedback and things you want to see the dashboard become. Because, basically we are building this for you. Our goal is to only build products that you want & need - you guys are in the driver seat. Oh and one more thing… it’s all free! (at least until sometime later when the accountants tell me it cant be