Today, the IgniteBLOG reported the first ever branded pharma tweet. The tweet came from twitter.com/racewithinsulin. Of course, I found out about  in on Twitter.

This development is interesting from a couple of perspectives. The twitter feed is from a brand advocate, rather than a company. The twitter homepage includes both Levemir and Novolog important safety information and logos as part of the page background, making it almost like a brand.com website. Ignite did a very nice writeup on the effort in a previous blog post, so I won’t repeat the analysis.

The tweet itself – apparently the 12th tweet made – includes both the full product name (brand name and generic), and a link to the prescribing information. My knee jerk response was to say this was out of step with the recent FDA crackdown and the new rules for paid search. But it’s not. There’s no indication anywhere (I had thought diabetes was in the twitter username – obviously now I see that it’s not). The link is even to the PI, rather than a brand or unbranded website. If you were weird enough to view it on the Twitter homepage for the account you would get the whole story. It’s like wearing belt and suspenders – they’re covered a couple of ways. To my mind they could have linked directly to the brand.com.

So congratulations to breaking some new ground to the team at Novo Nordisk! Weaving an occasional promo tweet into the stream from this brand advocate seems palatable enough from the point of view of one of his follows. “And now for a message from our sponsors.” Of course, they’ll have to watch the ratio of promotion to hard news, but that seems a reasonable trade-off.

Don’t have a big budget for Social Media Monitoring? There are many available free tools that are high-quality and offer interesting insights. The following list contains both Best-in-Class solutions for monitoring as well as specialty tools for specific purposes. If you know of one you feel should have made this list, use the comments section at the bottom of the post, and I’ll keep this updated.

Monitoring the Blogosphere / User Generated Content
Mainstream media lags substantially the buzz in the Blogosphere. Many people turn to blogs for news first, particularly in areas where experts offer specific insights or are ‘untainted’ by profit motives. You can track you own company, brands, and issues, using the following services. You can also easily track your competitor’s companies, brands, and issues.

Technorati One the best known and for good reasons. Comprehensive and with custom RSS feeds that let you get quick updates on any blog that mentions your company name.

Blog Pulse (Buzzmetrics) The free version of Buzzmetrics from Neilsen Online. It has very interesting trend and conversation tracking tools.

Google Blog Search If a tree falls in the blog forest, it’s likely that it will be found by Google Blog Search. Even if the blog isn’t in Google news, or doesn’t show in a Google search, Google Blog Search might still find that obscure story about that competitor’s launch. You can set up auto-alerts that will be delivered via email or RSS.

Trendpedia has a simple interface and seems to be well-regarded.

Icerocket was recently singled out to me by some Social Media pros as strong. It has tabs at the top to easily limit your search to Blogs, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

Boardtracker Forums and message boards can host some of the most important conversations about your company and brands. How can you find them? Use this.

Google Alerts makes it very simple to keep track of the latest buzz via email. Google Alerts let you track web, blogs, news and groups for any phrase you want. You can select to receive emails daily, weekly, or “as it happens.”

YouTube If you think of YouTube as a search engine it would now be #2 in search! Video is the preferred learning method of many people. Maybe your company or brand is there?

Facebook Lexicon Facebook has become so big, it’s time to pay attention to the conversations that happen there. All you need is a Facebook account to search any keyword and instantly see how often it is discussed on Facebook user’s “walls.”

Twitter
Twitter is an animal unto itself with an avid following. You can peer into the cyclone of posts by using one of the following tools. These are just a few of the many, Twitter seems to stoke creative software solutions.

Twitter Search is Twitter’s native search engine. Just type in what you’re looking for.

Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, JSON, and Twhirl.

Twit Scoop shows what’s hot on Twitter right now in a ‘cloud’ format. It has interesting search and graphing capability.

Other Interesting Discovery Tools
Blogs and message boards are just part of the ‘long tail’ of the UGC web.

Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by their users. People collectively determine the value of content. You can use the search box to see if you rank.

Stubleupon helps you “stumble” around the Web and find new content. You tell the service about your professional interests or your hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them.

That’s the short list of Best-in-Class solutions. It should be enough to keep you up all night searching. If you feel I’ve missed a key solutions, use the comments section at the bottom of the post, and I’ll update the list.

Later Additions:

Here’s a huge master list – How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit

A big list for Twitter specifically: 9 Twitter Search Apps : Better Than Twitter & Google

I recently got a head-ups from a friend in Toronto about this marketing breakthrough. Post – famous for bringing good whole wheat Shreddies cereal to Canadian breakfast tables for 67 years, has launched a major innovation.  For the first time in seven decades Shreddies is changing its shape, for a limited time, with new Diamond Shreddies cereal.

After a whirlwind of debate over which is better – the diamond or the square – and some controversy over square Shreddies appearing in Diamond Shreddies boxes, The President of Shreddies reflected on the Canadian Shreddies craze:

“When we introduced 45 degree rotational technology to put a new twist on Shreddies – an old family favourite – we had no idea the widespread excitement and discussion that would erupt within Canada and beyond our borders,” says The President of Shreddies. “We found ourselves amid a flurry of debate and discussion. Everyone from Canada’s leading media to bloggers to regular people got in on the Diamond versus Square debate.” According to online voting at www.diamondshreddies.com, Diamonds are in the lead with 66 per cent of the vote trailed by Squares with a mere 34 per cent. However, it has been confirmed that although the Square minority may be small – they’re vocal.

Sales are apparently up considerably since this product innovation was announced in March of this year. Commercials and focus groups (definitely worth a look) are available on the website.

Obama Logo

Much has been said about the marketing by both Presidential candidates this year. Obama was successful in creating a beautifully integrated campaign. From the TV commercials, to the great logo, it was very well done. I was at the ANA conference in Florida where he was voted Marketer of the Year. This Ad Age article is a great writeup.  Here’s a snippet:  “Change — and Positioning — You Can Believe in. Take a relatively unknown man. Younger than all of his opponents. Black. With a bad-sounding name. Consider his first opponent: the best-known woman in America, connected to one of the most successful politicians in history. Then consider his second opponent: a well-known war hero with a long, distinguished record as a U.S. senator.”