As online conversations continue to gain in prominence and relevance to any customer and market-focused business, it becomes critically important for marketing and service professionals to listen. It’s the listening that serves as the foundation for identifying, guiding, and establishing meaningful engagement.

Twitter is one of the more active and influential communities that can effectively recruit affiliates, incite action, and spark trends. Until now, the only way to measure conversations or keywords by authority in Twitter was either manually or through Technorati – assuming that the majority of people discussing any given topic had already claimed their Twitter. I suspect most haven’t done this nor realize that this is even an option with associated benefits in doing so.

Enter Twitority.

Twitority is a new service that that facilitates the search and sorting of keywords in Twitter by authority, or in less controversial terms, popularity. At the moment, authority is measured by followers, but perhaps, Twitority will eventually create an algorithm similar to Twinfluence in order to more accurately measure influence.

In the marketing and service worlds however, popularity is still relevant. As is, Twitority is a simple, yet helpful service that will help brand managers, community managers, and communications and customer service professionals tier research and response strategies and programs. It’s also helpful to identify and measure potential opportunities and new trends based on the weighted discussions surrounding relevant topics.

UPDATE: Over the weekend, Sean Percival and Ryan Sit also developed a Twitter search engine based on authority popularity, with a twist. Twithority provides side-by-side keyword results ranked by authority and also time/authority.

For more on services available for Twitter, please read, “Twitter Tools for Communications and Community Professionals.”

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Related reading on PR 2.0:

– The Socialization of Your Personal Brand
– In the Social Web, We Are All Brand Managers
– The State of Social Media 2008
– The Social Revolution is Our Industrial Revolution
– The Essential Guide to Social Media
– The Social Media Manifesto
– Introducing The Conversation Prism

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