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.

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Digital Reputation Analysis as a Political Tool 2. February 2010 – 18:09 by ActValue Consulting & Solutions

Web 2.0’s great power cannot be ignored.

Politicians have shown to understand this issue very well. They know that this new
way of communication can be used as a powerful tool to disseminate political programs
and to influence voters. Independent studies have shown that in the US President
Barack Obama has won the elections thanks to young people as never before. This
part of the population has voted for the democratic candidate en masse (2 out of
3 voters) and the number of young voting people has increased, for the very first
time, much more in comparison to any other voting category. In fact the influence
of the evolution in communication in the Web2.0 era has changed the way voters follow
the election campaign.

Voters are no longer simple watchers but nowadays they are proactive subjects who
determined the political programs and trends through the power of the informal web
(e.g. forum, social network, blog, newsgroup e wiki) which means that citizens exchange
opinions (positive or negative ones) in a free way , without discrimination.

Similarly politicians should use the same tools to test, detect and understand how
their programs are perceived by the voters and they can stimulate discussions and
gather useful feedback. Based upon the outcome of last year’s election, we estimate
that in Italy candidates who will be able to exploit web 2.0 can win up to 30% of
the voters aged between 18 and 25, the ones who did not vote.

The analysis and interpretation of opinions, judgments and prejudices found on the
net is a core activity for the protection and the promotion of brands, products
and services, people in terms of visibility, reputation, credibility. Candidates
should borrow this model from marketing (e.g. President Obama is a brand) to supervise,
defend and emphasize their image in order to create a competitive advantage for
the future. Audience will resonate a candidate’s name to a good feeling of deep
trust. Thus it is very important, as a political strategy, to create a feedback
between information gathered on the net and the definition of a candidate’s political
program

Here below we propose a model which can be used for web reputation analysis in the
political contest.

This model needs to be detailed and refined. The analysis outcome will then include
a Position Map of web domains, built upon their relevance, their visibility and
the tone (either positive or negative) of the conversations they host.

Participating in a few selected conversations and stimulating the right channels
a candidate will then be able to create a positive environment and influence the
voters’ feelings towards his/her political messages.

Concluding, we can say that web 2.0 is a terrific tool and it may give good interaction
opportunities to everybody; on the other hand it requires professionalism, skill
and experience to define and execute winning political strategies.

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