Use Twitter for Marketing Surveys and Polls 24. May 2010 – 10:19 by ActValue Consulting & Solutions

Few days ago Carnegie Mellon University published a survey about how useful is Twitter for the marketing research. In fact figures have shown that 86% of “twits” (opinions expressed on Twitter) are similar to traditional marketing surveys.
Noah Smith’s team has analyzed billion of twits related to Barak Obama’s election. They divided them into topics and sentiment (negative or positive) and they have traced the same trends as the official survey such as Index Consumer Sentiment (ICS) and the Economic Confidence Index (Gallup) have shown.
This experience is a pioneer for the evolution on the marketing research, which is still too much stuck to the traditional survey system. To develop a social network analysis can bring 3 advantages:
1- To get real time feed back
2- To avoid institutional channels in collecting opinions
3- To have access to improvised information generated by the customers and to get back to their questions with real time answers
This is a very hard challenge for the web technicians: the only thing they should to do is to trace a path of crumbs like Ulysses by Joyce.