Twitter Motivates Consumer Behavior - Tremendously.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Twitter Motivates Consumer Behavior - Tremendously.

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An article posted in New Scientist triggered a thought...and in a more comprehensive and useful context than I would have ever guessed. I had simply read it because of the intriguing nature of the title. A brief excerpt from the story is printed here, followed by a link to the entire article. Perhaps you can click on that link after you've read this entire post -- you'll perceive its implications much more clearly and profoundly if you will do this. Great title:

Twitter may influence the spread of disease

16:19 17 October 2011 by Debora MacKenzie

The northern hemisphere's flu season will soon be here. If you are getting vaccinated and tweet it, will your followers follow you to the doctor's surgery – or are they the sort of people who have an appointment booked already?

Researchers in the US have mined Twitter to map who tweets for and against flu vaccination, and found that the results parallel the prevalence of vaccination. Now they want to find out whether Twitter just reflects attitudes to vaccination or helps to spread them.

Marcel Salathé of Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, collected 478,000 tweets referring to flu in late 2009, when vaccination for the swine flu pandemic became available in the US. A team of students categorised 10 per cent of the tweets as for, against or neutral about vaccination. Then these tweets were used to create a computerised screening test that classified the rest.

Each tweet carried data on the region it came from. The team found that vaccination rates were lower in areas where tweets tended to be more negative about vaccination, and vice versa... [link to whole article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21055-twitter-may-influence-the-spread-of-disease.html?full=true&print=true]
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Twitter is not only a broadcast medium, but it is becoming more an more of an agent of consumer and business influence. It seems that Twitter accomplishes (in a grassroots, informal and largely qualitative fashion) what opinion polls and statistics have been traditionally used to demonstrate.

Several actionable suggestions:

1) You and your company must increase your presence on Twitter in terms of activity per account, the number of accounts, and the keywords associated with each of such accounts. Part of this requires creativity, but part requires simply adding some very topical RSS feeds into your Twitter tweet flow -- a great device for creating these mixed and exciting newsworthy feeds is TwitterFeed - I highly recommend it;

2) You should be choosy as to whom you follow (look for thought influencers, leaders, well-known 'pundits' and others with large followings), and you should collect data on how many of these Twitterers follow you back. You also want to get further metrics on who chooses to follow you without having been solicited. Possibly the best tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts on autopilot is TweetAdder - its potential is unlimited in terms of building an enormous Tweetosphere (a Lingovation);

3) The more Twitter accounts (each with a slightly different theme or twist), the better. Do not post the same content to each account, with the exception of certain status updates which link right back to your product but which don't sound flagrantly advertorial. These repetitive tweets might represent 10% to 20% of your total Twitter stream.

4) Set up Google Alerts or other Twitter-related services in order to take the Tweetosphere's temperature regarding your company and your industry. This is a wonderful step in relationship management and in showing responsiveness to the social media community. It is wonderful longer-term, broadly-focused PR as well.

Now, Mad Marketers, it is time to get to work. By the way...I cannot stand Twitter, but I use it out of necessity. It has become too important to ignore in its potential as an opinion-creator and as a call to action bullhorn.

Douglas E. Castle [http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com]

p.s. Just to make your search a bit easier, you can find Twitterfeed at http://twitterfeed.com. You can find some excellent RSS feeds on any topic at RSS Search Hub at http://www.rsssearchhub.com. You can get a version of TweetAdder (once you've bought it, you own it forever -- and it has unlimited Twitter campaign capacity and management features - just set it up and watch it build for you, but as it is very, very powerful, be certain that you don't violate Twitter's Terms Of Service by abusing it), by clicking on the picture below: