Bottlenose, named after dolphins for their association with social intelligence, is a recent development in social media circles. A website that aims to change the way people search, provides results in a real-time data stream. Highlighting current trends and focussing on information awareness rather than retrieval, it acts as a discovery tool to find out what the world is talking about.

Drawing comparisons with Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, Bottlenose brings all of your streams together from different social networks and feeds. Add multiple Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts, plus Google Reader and RSS feeds, and control your networks from one page. Taking advantage of founders Nova Spivack and Dominiek Ter Heide’s unique algorithm called ‘StreamSense’, Bottlenose is sophisticated and intuitive, with features that could be advantageous to businesses and brands.

Bottlenose has two main components - a live discovery portal and a personal dashboard for tracking interests. Type any word, phrase or name into its search bar and after a few seconds Bottlenose will update your stream with top trending links across the online media, related trending topics and people leading the conversation, in addition to images and recent comments on Twitter.

Live, subject-specific content is brought to your attention that can then be used to boost the visibility of your business through content marketing. The nature of the engine makes it easy to engage with major influencers of a certain topic. Marketers are also aware of exactly what their audience is talking about and have a grasp of the public mood at all times.

We take a closer look at three of its most beneficial marketing tools:

1. Sonar

Sonar highlights live trends in its visually-represented solar system. Complete with layers so you can filter what you want to view, Sonar continually updates your feed so you never lose track of the conversation.

This extent of knowledge is invaluable to businesses especially those with a heavy reliance on content. Being able to tune into what your target audience are discussing enables marketers to produce content that is relevant, timely and audience-specific. It then has a better chance of being picked up on the web, shared across social networks and encourages vital interaction with users.

2. Live filtering and rules

Bottlenose presents reams of information but by utilising its filtering and rules options, marketers can obtain the precise content that they need quickly. It’s quite likely that as a result of performing advanced searches, which is split into message, media type, marketplace and knowledge, you’ll discover content that may not have revealed itself on a generic search engine.

Another good feature is being able to create ‘rules’. For instance, if you wanted to know when someone in your online network mentions your company, should it happen you’d be alerted to this content on your dashboard. As you can connect Bottlenose with other social network accounts, you could schedule said mention to be posted on LinkedIn or retweeted later that day.

With no limit on the number of rules you can create, it’s fairly easy to extract information across networking platforms. It could also prove useful in gauging customer reaction if you had recently launched a promotion, for example. So not only are you enabling interaction with social network users but Bottenose could have multiple benefits in terms of data capturing and audience research.

3. Write once, engage everywhere

It’s proven that timely and consistent content sharing will raise the profile of your business and in Bottlenose you can author and publish those messages across all of your networks at the same time. Attached to this feature are economical benefits because it frees your employees to do other tasks away from their desk. Marketers may also want to doctor the messages and send a more formal version to their LinkedIn account while saving a more playful message for Facebook.

Could you see yourself gravitating to the power of Sonar? Share your thoughts at the end of this post or leave them on the Klood Facebook or Twitter page.