Flashback, last Fall: We couldn’t get on Facebook without playing a round of Scrabulous and Superpoking all our friends.  By Spring, however, we’d become tired of all the drivel and wanted something a little more utilitarian.  Today, professional social network LinkedIn answers our prayers by launching its own set of apps–for grown ups!

Unlike Facebook or MySpace, LinkedIn is putting the apps through a rigorous approval process to make sure that the apps are (surprise) professional.  The initial offering of ten productivity apps should prove useful for serious business folks.  Today, socialTNT takes a look at Company Buzz, one of the new LinkedIn apps that could become a powerful tool for PR and Marketing Pros.

Using Company Buzz to Monitor Conversations on Twitter

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.  It’s truly the living web, a world where you can find what people are thinking about a product, company or topic in real time.  Company Buzz lets you search for key terms, shows you related terms that appear in Tweets with your search term, and graphs the volume of Tweets that mention your search term.  Take a look:

In the above screen cap, you can see the layout of the top half of the app.  In the top right-hand corner, you can see the list of search terms.  LinkedIn autopopulates your list with your company names.  You can remove these or add your own search terms.  In the screen cap, we’ve searched for McCain.  The query results are shown on the left hand side in traditional Twitter-feed style.

This screen shot shows the app below the fold.  Here’s where the app becomes a little more robust.  In the top right corner, you can find “Buzz Words.”  Buzz words are words that are found in tweets mentioning your keywords.  These can be incredibly useful for finding related words you may not have associated with your original search terms.

The box marked “Trends” graphs out the number of Tweets mentioning your keyword.  This is good for reporting, especially for a launch or event.

When building your search, you may want to add multiple terms for one search.  Just click on “Manage” in the “Topics” box.  Then click on “Edit” next to the query you want to change.

Then just click “Add an another search term,” type it in, and hit save.

We found LinkedIn’s Company Buzz to be a great monitoring tool.  One of the major drawbacks was lack of conversation threading.  That’s why we still recommend Twitter Search for conversation tracking. This is still a great tool for trending and monitoring.

Other apps on LinkedIn we found useful were SlideShare, Huddle, WordPress and box.net.  Check them out yourself, or you can learn more about LinkedIn’s new applications on TechCrunch or in Co-Founder Reid Hoffman’s video, below.

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