Rowfeeder is like a lot of apps. It tracks keyword mentions on Twitter. The difference, however, is how it records them: Straight into a Google spreadsheet.

For PR pros, this avoids a lot of the problems that the other services have.

• There’s no daily e-mail report (if you’re in PR, you’re already getting a lot of these).
• There’s no new site/interface to log in and deal with.
• The resulting information is incredibly easy to share, whether it’s with colleagues or clients.

At $2.49 for a two-day period, it’s a great deal, especially for product launches, big articles, or events. Did I mention it updates the Google spreadsheet in real-time? It’s impressive stuff.

The downside

The inherent drawback of the service is that it is, in some ways, too powerful and too demanding on both the Twitter side and the Google Docs side. Rowfeeder can’t yet handle the more frequently occurring keywords, but they do have a nifty feature on their site which will tell you if they can handle yours.

It also doesn’t support phrase tracking (any search term with spaces), which unfortunately leaves out a lot of my own search terms. The app itself apparently can handle it, but you have to contact them to set it up.

Since you’re setting up a two-day period, there is some planning time in advance. It’s not a “fire and forget” service like Google Alerts. I imagine the time it saves makes this worth it, although it might be tough to practice this sort of discipline when planning a big event or product launch. Like with phrases, you can contact the team to set up extended tracking over longer periods of time.

If it helps any, know that they’re very approachable guys.

Some things I would like to see

Links: It’s hard to find a site that doesn’t link Twitter usernames to a profile. Rowfeeder spreadsheets don’t. I know it’s possible, and I find myself wondering why they don’t include this feature.

Hand-holding: Rowfeeder gives a lot of extra data in the Google Docs. Some of it is straightforward, like the graph. Some of it’s a little bit more complicated, like the Tweet Data tab.

More graphs: Right now everything is tabular with one graph. If I handed this job off to a person, I’d tell him/her to make some graphs that I can show off at a meeting. I’d probably be paying a person more than $2.50, but the information’s there, so why not take advantage?

The conclusion

Rowfeeder is a steal for what you get. Public Relations professionals seem to be scrambling to show off ROI for all this fun new stuff they’re doing. I think a Rowfeeder spreadsheet is the step in the right direction.