Twitter search is an essential part of how brands can use Twitter to interact with consumers. Tweetdeck provides you with columns that each represent a different Twitter stream/search and you can also import your Facebook newsfeed. Tweetdeck, in my opinion, is one of the best Twitter desktop clients, especially if you're managing a brand.

Your first column is probably going to be your own Twitter stream (unless you're sorely using the client to monitor brad mentions, in that case you'd use a brand mention search for your first column). Your second column (if you using this for your personal stream and to manage a brand) will be your personal "@ reply" column.

Your third column then would most likely be your brand "@ reply" column.

You fourth column would be a search for brand and brand related names (for example "Virgin Airlines, Virgin America, and Virgin Atlantic). You will want to use these perimeters for more than one search term:

• AND will search for both search terms (or more if used).
• OR will for either one or the other search term (or terms).
• Use ‘quotes’ to search for a specific search phrase.

The "AND" and/or "OR" must be in all caps to return the right search. So for Virgin example your search would look like this: Virgin Airlines OR Virgin America OR Virgin Atlantic, which will return anyone's mention of any three of the brands.
(Here is the link for all of the advanced search Twitter possibilities.)

My suggestion is that your fourth column be a search term that is related to your brand. Keeping with the Virgin example, a representative from Virgin might be searching "flights," "vacation," or for "flights" near all of airport Virgin airlines serves (ex. "flights" near:"Boston").
The value of this is to reach out to potential customers. For example, someone who tweets "Looking for flight for my upcoming vacation to Cancun!" A Virgin representative could then reply to that person to inform them that Virgin now flies to Cancun and ask where he/she is flying out of to see if a Virgin flight is a good match.

Now, you can have as many columns as you'd like in Tweetdeck (four fit nicely across a full size screen), but you can scroll through more if you want to add more or refine your searches more.
The best set up at a workspace if you'll be doing social media managing, is to have two screens. One that you do your normal work/browsing on and then a separate one just for Tweetdeck so that while you're doing your day-to-day work you can keep an eye on your searches and respond to consumers in a timely manner. If you are not so fortunate, you can set up alerts from Tweet deck that pop-up in the corner of your screen to tell you when certain things have been tweeted about, so then you can look to see if it's worth responding to.

It's important to keep in mind when responding to tweets from a business account, that you should do so in a manner that seems trustworthy and fairly informal because people are more likely to respond to something that seems less like a sales pitch a more like a friendly suggestion or inquiry.
I will discuss this in my presentation about social media philosophy & strategy this upcoming week (2/16) so if you read this and have questions you can post them in the comments or wait until my presentation where I can hopefully answer them fully in person.

I am also open to holding a "workshop" of sorts for people who may be interested in getting a walk-through of setting up Tweetdeck or any other social media tools that are new to you. You want to feel that you full understand the use and how to use all of these tools if you want to present them to your employer or apply for jobs as a social media manager.