More easily tracking your brand (or your competitors) = helpful.
Doing it through Twitter DMs = not so much, imho.
Twitter just has way too much noise, so it's not a great interface for receiving alerts about important information. I'd rather get alerts via RSS or some sort of custom dashboard. Better yet -- offer the alerts as many different ways as possible: RSS, Twitter, web dashboard, iPhone app, email, etc. and let users use as many different alert methods as they want.
For my last job (community management at a startup), I had a ton of RSS feeds set up pulling in blog searches, Twitter searches, web searches, etc. on our brand. I also had email alerts set up, and a Twhirl running in the background on our Twitter account pinging me on @ replies. My goal was to make sure I had as many different ways to catch, filter, and alert on all that info as possible so I didn't miss anything important. (Something to filter out the redundancies would have been nice, fyi! :)).
Doing it through Twitter DMs = not so much, imho.
Twitter just has way too much noise, so it's not a great interface for receiving alerts about important information. I'd rather get alerts via RSS or some sort of custom dashboard. Better yet -- offer the alerts as many different ways as possible: RSS, Twitter, web dashboard, iPhone app, email, etc. and let users use as many different alert methods as they want.
For my last job (community management at a startup), I had a ton of RSS feeds set up pulling in blog searches, Twitter searches, web searches, etc. on our brand. I also had email alerts set up, and a Twhirl running in the background on our Twitter account pinging me on @ replies. My goal was to make sure I had as many different ways to catch, filter, and alert on all that info as possible so I didn't miss anything important. (Something to filter out the redundancies would have been nice, fyi! :)).