Saturday 30 May 2009

Twitter for market research

Twitter should get more intelligent (Wolfram Alpha?). If we are putting in a query from India, the results should be sorted so we get more relevant "Indian" results.

Anyway, we wrote a while back on how new media is allowing consumers to learn more about products and develop their own opinions. So that the role of a brand manager is likely to change in the future from an "instructor" to a "facilitator". http://rituvenkat12.blogspot.com/2007/10/age-of-brand-facilitator.html

We finaly got onto Twitter some weeks back and the first thing that struck us was :
- CHEAP MARKET RESEARCH! (Dip stick anyway).

We typed in a few brands...Nike/ Vodafone...and got a lot of twits that indicating what consumers were experiencing with each brand.

But most responses were "foreign" and we could not get an Indian feel to this. So we typed in a very well known Indian mobile services brand. And then things got very interesting.

People are twitting about its new services...its business plans etc. But mostly people are twitting about their experience of its products and services.

Mostly they are complaining. (we estimated 70% negative twits product/ services).

This is interesting, because the twitters are tech savvy, early adopters. They are passionate about technology and its usage. If they are complaining, its a good reason to look into why.

We are not sure if the brand manager at this company twits or even reads twitter. But he should.

But if Twitter could classify results relevant to the country of the twitter (India in our case), this would become a very interesting tool even for multinational marketing managers.

Ritu and Venkat

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