The primary message from "Follow the Tweets" claims that by using Twitter and tweets on a trending topic, based upon positive or negative word correlation, businesses can allow for the prediction of product sales. Then based upon the predictive information they can decide where to increase inventories. In order to prove their theory, the article digresses into an example where this method of tracking positive word correlation before, during and after three movies opened at the box office over a given weekend. The study concluded that positive tweets directly corresponded with the success of the three movies at the box office opening weekend and beyond.
However, I must say, I am rather skeptical of a company's reliance on Twitter to predict EVERYTHING. While I think movies are an appropriate example of predicting popularity, on both opening weekend and in the weeks following, I would be hesitant to say that this means of prediction would work for all products and companies. This comes from the standpoint of how I see Twitter primarily being used. For me and many others I feel that Twitter serves as a platform to reiterate information they have discovered on the web, namely noteworthy articles, videos and pictures. I feel that the corporate presence on Twitter, from a selling standpoint, is often frowned upon and seen as an encroachment upon users' online experience. I know that I am far less likely to promote a sale at taking place at a department store than I am to tweet about a particular article I found on the web. I think this is one of the issues overlooked in this article, not everyone is going to be interested in promoting businesses and projects through their Twitter. The thought of me posting "@jcan great sale at Macy's, you should check it out!", in my mind winds up sounding like a sales pitch and all around generic. And if companies were to engage in this behavior, I would be inclined to consider it spam.
One thing that has cropped up again and could be the one saving grace of this strategy, is the idea of the influencer. In the, "Specifically executives need to know section", the article mentions that companies need to be aware of the influencers, but disregard athletes and other celebrities, rather they encourage executives to seek out those who are active in the Twitter community. If they can harness the influencers to promote their products and sales without making it sound corporately engineered then they may just be able to make this work. Now all we need to know, is the jury still out on whether or not those influencers exist?
For me this article did not really cut the mustard, while it offered the one movie example it really did not convince me that sales can almost always predicted on the basis of Twitter traffic. I also feel it is encouraging a form of marketing and sales pitches that have been widely frowned upon on Twitter and other social media tools. I go to Twitter to with the intention of sharing and reading aggregated articles from across the web or tweeting @ friends. I still don't see the appeal of companies marketing their products through Twitter. So what's the deal am I being overly skeptical, would people embrace this method of marketing to the extent where it predicts sales?
Hadley,
ReplyDeleteI think you raise a good point in terms of being skeptical about predicting everything from twitter posts. I agree that there are probably only certain things that such a prediction process would work for, but i'm sure there are also times where that could go terribly wrong. I also believe that most pople are on twitter to catch up on the news they are interested and see what their friends are up to, and that marketing and sales pitches would not grasp their attention. I, too, would probably think they were spam. You make a good point that companies should be careful about how they use Twitter because i doubt many people would embrace it. but that's just my opinion!
YES, the example in this article was very weak in my opinion as well. I guess you need to start your research somewhere, but it seemed to use a very simplistic example, gauging the popularity of 2 really poor movies vs. one of the biggest blockbusters in years to assert Twitters ability for executives to gauge general consumer demand. It even suggested they could do this to set inventory levels based on locality of the various Tweets. These are aggressive assertions that are in no way backed-up by the example used.
ReplyDeleteWhile I understand your opinions, I disagree with your assessment of the article overall. I think this article brings up a concept that we had not been presented to us. While we have examined social media for marketing, I think this article presents the idea of using it for operational purposes. I think we may have had a difference in understanding of this article. You mentioned how you don’t think the companies using Twitter as marketing would work, but my understanding was that the companies themselves were not actually doing any tweeting. I thought that they were just monitoring the tweets of users. I think this is an interesting concept, because it is different. We have heard about companies using social media for marketing, which I think is very tricky to do without making users mad.
ReplyDeleteBut I also worry about the thing you brought up. Movies worked for this situation, but I agree that for most companies and most products it wouldn’t. It works for movies, because movies are such a social thing and are known to be reviewed a lot. Most products are not socially talked about, and most people don’t review that many types of products. I think it is common for people to ask “seen any good movies recently?” But not ask, “Have you bought any (insert product like TV, or glassware, or air conditioning unit)?” So I think this is an interesting concept, but not applicable to that many products.
I agree with your comments that the example in the article was weak. They should've used a better example to support their assertions. Thanks for pointing this out, as I didn't even think about that in my first read through.
ReplyDeleteHadley,
ReplyDeleteGreat points you brought up. The authors could have definitely used a stronger example to prove their points than the movies. I do think that they bring up a fantastic point though -- that Twitter and other social media tools can be used in a predicative way that can help a business a great deal. I would venture to say that companies will be leveraging these tools more and more as they gain a better understanding and are able to engage their consumers in new ways.