It's a Twitter World

I read an interesting article in the AdAge newsletter today about correlation between Twitter and Hollywood's box office success. Simon Dumenco's "Could Twitter Destroy Hollywood's Marketing Magic?" reflects on the recent Baltimore Sun article "Twitter Effect rattles Hollywood" written by Michael Sragow. Dumenco's article uses the Trendrr Chart of the Week to establish his observations between the relationship between the number of tweets and the movie's overall gross. It appears from the chart that the higher volume of tweets resulted in a higher box office income. However, what Dumenco misses that Sragow gets is that it is not necessarily the quantity of tweets, but the content of the tweets. While the quantity of tweets helps the topic reach "Trending Topics" status, I personally recall "Bruno" being a trending topic that was accompanied by an overwhelming amount of negative tweets.

It is very apparent that Twitter is really beginning to have an impact on word-of-mouth promotion and demotion not only on movies, but television series, music, and other brands. Looking further into this, I came across a site called TweetFeel. The site allows the user to type in whatever keyword is desired and receive a calculation on positive or negative Tweets about the topic. This tool could potentially be very helpful for companies to track the word-of-mouth on a particular brand. For example, the movie Inglourious Basterds has just begun its nation-wide opening weekend, but TweetFeel has already calculated the results of 62 tweets that revealed a 87% positive response to the keyword. It also displays actual Tweets so the user can see what is being said on the topic: "Inglourious Basterds is AMAZING. Go see." "[Username] thought Inglourious Basterds is amazing and wants to see it again!"

However, there are some tweaks to work out with TweetFeel. Sometimes the system picks up a tweet that contains the keyword, but may not truly reflect a negative or positive attitude toward that keyword. I searched the brand soda "Sprite" and was given 33 tweets that resulted in a 91% rate of positive tweets on the brand. However, negative tweets on the brand included ones such as, "I don't like Sprite with skittles yuck!" whereas a positive tweet on the brand included, "I need a Sprite and some skittles to regroup."

Twitter will continue to be an important tool in word-of-mouth promotion for brands and I have to agree with Dumenco when he says, "Some day soon somebody's going to get a Ph.D. in the statistical parsing of Twitter data streams -- high-concept stuff far beyond the purview of the humble Trendrr Chart of the Week." And, while I'm at it, follow Simon Dumenco on Twitter.