Tweettronics

Executive Summary

Tweets are Plentiful and Valuable

Over 100 million people are using twitter.com. What they are saying matters and you should be listening. Tweets have value because they are a free and highly credible form of word-of-mouth advertising and communications. They can create customer interest, increase intent to purchase and grow revenues.

In addition to being a form of market research, Tweets are essentially free advertising for a company. Consider that if 100,000 people read a Tweet, the equivalent impact is the same as spending $1.50 per click-through on 66,000 Google AdWords customers. From a reach perspective, it is equivalent to reaching 10-50,000 customers with more traditional media that may have a cost per thousand (CPM) in the $2-10 range depending upon choice of media. The difference is that Tweets are freely produced by customers and prospects. Marketing investments that cause or influence Tweets can, as a result, have a high return on zero or little investment.

Tweettronics Tracks Effectively

Tweettronics provides a low cost and real time basis for tracking current and emerging Tweets about products, competitors, sales and service levels. It enables identification of high volume, high impact commentators for targeting influence efforts. And it also lowers the cost of tracking comments from grassroots, low volume and less visible commentators by aggregating their comments. Because the volume of Tweets is so large, tools are needed for automating the process. Tracking a million Tweets a day is beyond the capability of human analysts. A large Tweettronics account might be interested in tracking as many as 80 topics and as many as 800,000 Tweets a day (or approximately 300M Tweets per year which might be roughly equivalent to as much as $500M of advertising).

Understanding which high volume commentators using Twitter have influence and credibility offers a low cost way of promoting both issues and products. The use of social media can be significantly less expensive, and in many cases more credible than advertising and publicity campaigns. Ford, for example, loaned 100 Ford Fiestas to well-connected social networkers as an effective and low cost way of gaining the attention of their high volume follower networks.

Tweettronics can leverage your marketing budget by allowing you to target the important influencers. If you are an agency, it can increase the value created for your marketing services client. Changes in the number of people tweeting, the volume of Tweets per user and the phrases and words in the Tweet provide new ways of measuring impact.

Whether you are a product manager, sales or customer service managers, marketing or public relations agency, Tweettronics products and services are a simple choice for monitoring and anticipating issues and trends. Trial of the service is easy and free, and backed up by service staff to provide with support when you are on a deadline or in a crisis or need additional tracking.

Introduction

Valuing Tweets

Tracking what customers and prospects are saying is important. You need to know how many people are talking about your product, how involved they are and what attitudes, words and phrases are being used to understand how your product or service is being perceived. Tweettronics tracks at least a million tweets a day for customers — in other words the equivalent of a $500M+ advertising spend over a full year if we equate the value of a Tweet to that of a click through advertisement.

If a million people are reading “free” content driven by Tweets, it could save between $1.5 million and $10 million in advertising spending on other media (click through advertising, banner advertising, traditional media such as TV or radio). And even if you value the influence of Tweets at a lower amount, the sheer volume is such that they can amplify or detract from traditional advertising and communication programs.

If a high credibility commentator highlights your product or service, it can be worth much even more in terms of revenue impact. Say for example, that one million individuals are affected by Twitter postings and 1/10 of one percent of followers spend $100 on your product, the publicity creates $100,000 of business. Obviously for a more expensive product, the revenues are larger.

But tracking can mean listening on more than an individual product. It can help marketers understand what customers and prospects think of a brand, the use of an individual or family of products, attitudes towards a competitor, a proposed new product or service, or experience with a sales force, a customer service department. These are all areas that used to require formal and expensive market research.

Tracking Tweets

Today, the proliferation of comments on the Internet offers a new and low cost opportunity to monitor customer sentiment in real time with practically no effort. You can think of monitoring customers' social comments as real-time and continuous market research. Many companies have not yet realized the benefits of this lower cost market research. Tracking user volume, engagement and sentiment in real time is typically less expensive than focus groups. It samples more people and more comments so outlying comments become visible more quickly. Unlike traditional market research, Twitter is more like a diary study where the data is collected in real time.

“Deviant” or unusual uses of products can be spotted earlier sometimes highlighting potential problems and or emerging opportunities from new uses, more quickly.

As a key indicator of customer interest, engagement or sentiment, Tweets, or short form messages sent by individuals to their followers offer the advantage of being frequent, brief and easily searched. Tweets may be sent as a stand-alone message or alternatively to promote other content such as a blog posting. But because Tweets are easy to send, they represent advance warning on other more long form user-created content. And unlike longer form content such as blog postings, metrics on volume are easier to obtain.

Observations

The distribution of Tweets reveals three important conclusions.

• First, a small number of commentators account for the highest volume of Tweets.
• Second, micro-targeting of influential commentators means tracking not only what is being written about but who is writing about it. These high volume Tweeters represent a highly targetable group with great leverage opportunities.
• Third, lower volume commentators also have impact but are difficult to reach without understanding their behavior and putting in place programs targeted at a large group of less followed Tweeters.

What do Tweettronics Reports Show?

Easy to Setup

Tweettronics is your partner is keeping your finger on the pulse of a larger number of commentators. Tweetronics typically tracks over 350 million Tweets per year or roughly a million Tweets per day for its customers. Such tracking is impossible to do without automation. Tweettronics' goal is to make it easy for you to use the output of Twitter.com to understand trends in your market, your competition or regions. And when volumes get too high, Tweettronics can use sampling to speed up the process of tracking and keep your costs down.

Setting up a Tweettronics report is a simple exercise that can take as little as five minutes. You type in lists of words and phrases that you wish to track. These might include product names of competitive products in a category (e.g. iPad, Playbook, Thinkpad, tablet, etc.), or they might be phrases that are associated with an issue or topic (e.g. a political candidate name, global warming, climate change, cap and trade, etc.).

Understand the Results

Tweettronic reports provide real time tracking of:

1. Trends over time of comments incorporating key words or phrases. Spikes in volume can be setup to trigger notifications via email to the account manager, agency or client.
2. Regional differences in comments.
3. Positive and negative words showing up in Tweets.
4. Influence and reach of those tweeting about the area of interest.
5. Number of Tweets for different products or topics, number of tweets per individual on the product or topic.
6. For individual commentators, it provides information on the reach of the commentator to direct readers of his/her Tweet, and a potential reach via secondary followers, i.e. followers of the commentator's followers. This secondary group represents a reachable group if the comment is retweeted or referred to by a follower of the initial comment.

The analytics provided allow the manager or agency to compare the volume of Tweets. As a general rule, a larger number of Tweets means higher mindshare, awareness and interest. The number of Tweets per product or topic is a good measure of the degree of engagement or involvement of the individual. If someone is writing many Tweets about a product, service, service issue or topic, it's a pretty safe bet that they are highly involved.

The source of the Tweet reveals where influence is occurring within the Tweeting population or a particular geographic region. And the followership of a person Tweeting (i.e. the number of subscribers) allows valuing their reach and impact. Reach and influence allows estimating the value of a Tweeter and can be used to justify efforts to reach out to those with large influence or put in place programs to encourage more interest and traffic.

Situations Where Tracking Real Time Activity and Sentiment Matters

Scenarios

Understanding who is talking about your company, brand and product, addressing particular topics and issues or writing about your competition has value in numerous situations. Examples include:

1. Startups and launch strategies
2. Competitive analysis
3. Focus group design
4. Sales force performance
5. Customer service center performance
6. Quality problems
7. Business development for marketing/public relations agencies
8. Measuring campaign impact
9. Issue tracking
10. Crisis prevention and management
11. Acquisitions and due diligence
12. Sarbanes-Oxley due diligence and audit validation
13. Political campaign and attitude tracking

Startups

Many ideas for startups begin with an idea but no market research. A quick survey of comments, beliefs, problems and attitudes about a product area can quickly support or disprove a business idea. The low cost of surveying Tweets makes it an ideal fit with a low cost investigation. It's also good homework to perform before doing more formal market research or development of a focus group.

Competitive Analysis

It's only human to focus your attention on your own product, service or department. Looking outside to what customers are saying keeps companies in touch. The automated searching and tracking features of Tweettronics provide a neutral view of relative competitive performance. And if you are trying to move the dial, tracking Tweet content provides an easily accessed and timely set of metrics.

Focus Group Design

It's always been more art than science designing a set of focus group issues. With Tweet tracking, focus group design can be based upon what people are saying. Apparent trends can be based upon the data generated by Tweettronics and investigated in more detail in a focus group. Issues that might have been missed can be included. And where the focus group has highlighted the need for more research, Tweet research can fill in the holes at lower cost or validate conclusions developed from the focus group.

Sales Force Performance

Monitoring a sales force is a delicate area. Too much emphasis upon sales goals and clients may feel harassed. Poor sales people can alienate customers and drive them to the competition. Bad pricing policies may be difficult to see in the short term with lost sales to competitors initially invisible. In markets where a competitor is performing better than your own sales forces, user Tweets may reveal such a trend before significant revenues are lost. Tracking Tweets about sales forces can act as an early warning system signaling the need to improve performance or imitate what is being successful at the competition.

Customer Service Center Performance

Customer service centers are always on tight budgets. Measurement activities often play second fiddle to the issue of productivity. Tracking external customer comments about the customer service function and reveal information often not tracked in the CRM systems. And given the low cost of tracking Tweets, competitive comparisons are easy and inexpensive to do.

Quality Problems

With today's sophisticated search engines, many quality and support problems show up earlier on the Internet than they do in internal tracking systems. It's common advice for consumers to search on solutions to problems on the Internet rather than go to a supplier web site. These comments and discovered solutions are often expressed in Tweets whose frequency provides a new form of measurement for quality.

Business Development for Marketing/Public Relations Agencies

If you are a marketing or public relations agency, Tweet tracking can help in two ways. First, it can help you with business development. Running a low cost Tweettronics tracking campaign can highlight marketing and public relations problems that you can bring to a prospect to highlight a problem they are not aware of. Hard data that shows a trend or emerging problem is often a key requirement for winning business. Differential performance between competitors can also sensitize a prospect to the need to be more active in influencing influencers, buyers, prospects or stakeholders for an issue.

Measuring Campaign Impact

Marketing and public relations campaigns often involve “moving the needle”. Tracking sales is easy, but tracking the intermediate stages of attitude change, or intent to purchase, net promoter score, positive and negative comments provides an intermediate set of metrics prior to sales changes, or in the case of public relations campaigns, the actual metric itself. Tracking the positive and negative sentiment in Tweets can be set up easily and monitored continuously.

Issue Tracking

Whether you are promoting a product, a political candidate or an issue, real time monitoring can be very expensive. The low cost nature of Tweet tracking allows any organization to track issues in real time. And when a topic spikes, limited budgets can be allocated to the small number of topics highlighted by the Tweettronics reports as being high volume and important.

Crisis Prevention and Management

Brands can be easily damaged. Toyota, one of the best car companies in the world has experienced negative publicity over the past two years because of claims about unusual driving events that have been variously ascribed to computer problems, floor mats blocking brakes/accelerators, or driver error. These kinds of sentiments are best fixed early and the only way to fix them early is to continually track customer and reviewer sentiment, reported problems and negative comments.

Acqusitions and Due Diligence

If there is one rule about making an acquisition or investment in a company, it should be “Avoid surprises”. The availability of real time commentary on products, services and competition means that checking out Twitter sentiment should be a part of any due diligence exercise.

Sarbanes-Oxley Due Diligence

The Sarbanes-Oxley act requires that senior management and auditors represent that they processes in place in an organization address all the major issues and risks that could affect the accuracy of reported income and assets. Traditionally, the focus of management and auditors has been inward. But in a world with a “commentariat” expressing itself on social networks such as Twitter, it is prudent to validate internal review processes. Measuring external measures of performance such as volume of Tweets, degree of engagement and type of positive and negative comment provides a check on internal systems and reporting.

Political Campaign and Attitude Tracking

Running a political campaign is an increasingly expensive exercise. While telephone polling is a traditional approach to tracking, the increased use of cell phones and Internet-based services such as Skype may introduce biases into samples. Using multiple media to track attitudes can reveal holes in data sampling. The audience that Tweets is not necessarily a complete map of American voters, but it provides one of several media that need to be tracked to create the new picture of America.

Tweettronics Services

Tweettronics offers two ways of doing business: self-service or contracted services.

Self-Service

With self-service, a product manager, agency or marketing firm can set up a monitoring program with little effort. A 14-day trial program makes it easy and low risk to try out the service. The user defines the phrases or words that he/she is interested in tracking and the system analyzes Tweets to produce reports on positive and negative word occurrence, positive and negative phrase occurrence and the source of comments.

Contracted Services

In a crisis, or situations where the agency/product manager is under extreme time pressure, Tweettronics customers can engage Tweettronics to manage the Tweet tracking, product reports and recommendations based upon Tweet sentiment, or add additional social networking and search engine tracking services.

Summary

Paying Attention

Paying attention to customers is always valuable. Listening to what works well and what works badly can quickly translate into sales, viral marketing success or quick resolution of problems and prevention of crises.

But even without such obvious benefits, encouraging social networks and referrals via Tweets is a low cost substitute for click through or banner advertising and also for much more expensive traditional marketing media. As with any marketing program, measurement is required to determine what investments make sense, how much to spend on encouraging high volume communicators or enabling customers to tell their friends about your product, service or issue.

And if you are spending on traditional media or pursuing a more integrated marketing campaign across traditional and new media, tracking the reaction of customers and prospects via Tweets provides a low cost method of monitoring changes in engagement and attitude.

Tweets Matter

Tweets matter. They provide inexpensive market research, a substitute for more expensive advertising and the opportunity to influence those with large social networks. Given the low cost of gaining this window into customers' views and beliefs, perhaps the question should be: “Why are you not listening to users all the time, when it so inexpensive and effortless?” It takes as little as five minutes to set up a monitoring campaign. And the cost of monitoring is far less than traditional market research, focus groups or the benefits of targeting influential users.