Raising Capital on Twitter

As in the physical world, no one likes to be solicited for contributions online. A better Twitter tack: Don't ask, just inform.

Last Thanksgiving, Epic Change, a nonprofit that encourages people to tell their stories to transform communities, launched the Tweetsgiving Web site, with the help of theKbuzz, a word-of-mouth marketing firm.

Tweetsgiving asked people to tweet what they were grateful for, and compiled the responses at #tweetsgiving, with a link back to the Tweetsgiving site, where users had the option of contributing money to build classrooms in Tanzania.

Over the 48-hour campaign, 15,000 people came to the Tweetsgiving site; 360 donated, for a total of $11,000. "We never asked people to give," says Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change. "We got people invested in their own, personalized way."

Research on Twitter

Hedge funds have long tried to get an edge by using computer programs to scan news sources for nuggets of information.

The next iteration, care of StreamBase: software that monitors Twitter for gems traders can use.

Automatic searches via third-party applications such as TweetDeck can mine gold, too.