Coming from a technical background, I love this kind of stuff. Church of the Customer’s Jackie Huba writes about the speed with which Salesforce.com responded to a post she wrote about them on Twitter. How did they find this so fast? Do they have a special vanity search division, polling the major search engines constantly? No – they built a clever Yahoo Pipe to do the work for them.

This is a good example of the way companies and people are able to track their exposure in a world of New and Internet Marketing. I would even go so far to say if you are engaged in New Marketing, e.g. social networks, blogging, viral videos, etc, then you must be using tools such as the Firehose Filter to report and gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Here, you can take a look at the generic version of this social media firehose filter. This has really opened my eyes to the power of Yahoo Pipes.