We’ve been dying to share with you our great new app called tweetfeel. This new application scours Twitter for Tweets about brands of your choice and shows you how positively or negatively Twitter users feel about it. Whether it’s Dell or Poptarts or Madonna, we’ll show you a sample of recent tweets as well as an overall rating for the brand. It’s a quick way to get a feel for what people are thinking!
tweetfeel uses an algorithm that is more complicated than simply counting happy faces and sad faces. Because only a small sample of people use emoticons , apps doing it that way miss out on the majority of people who talk about brands using words. This means that tweetfeel produces results that are more accurate than other applications doing a similar thing
At the time of this post, Twitter tweets were 63% positive, Dell tweets were 53% negative, and Poptart tweets were 92% positive. Try out your favorite brands to see how they rank!
Follow tweetfeeldotcom on Twitter and we’ll share some results with you every day.
Though we love to read computer programming books about Symfony, PHP, and Flash, Jean’s love of ‘real’ books has opened a new world for us. So, in no particular order, we’ve each listed out one book we’ve recently enjoyed. Perhaps you might want to read one of these yourself.
1) Good to Great by Jim Collins: Shows that greatness is not a function of circumstance, but largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.
2) The Purple Cow by Seth Godin: It reminds me to not be boring, and that playing it safe is risky and very good is bad.
3) Click by Bill Tancer: Great insights around what people say they do and what they actually do regarding the internet
4) The Snowball by Warren Buffett: Interesting insight on life and business, start small, cultivate great ideas, pick the right people, be honest, work hard, and things will snowball.
5) The Little Church that Could by Jean Marie Davis: Not available for purchase (yet) but it’s a fun and inspirational review of the signs posted outside one church for an entire year
6) www.google.com: Google has the answer to every question – you just have to know how to ask it. [ok, ok, this isn't a book, but you get the point]
It’s been a busy few days! Jean flew in for three days of back to back Conversessions. We love it when she comes because it means an extra-large dose of passion, a tasty lunch on the house, and some animated gut-busting stories. My suggestion – Ask her about The Family Feud!
Once our US sales executive arrived as well, we settled in for the three day Conversession. Our main goal? evolisten. Oh, the things you can accomplish when you stick to the schedule! We reviewed and revised the project plans. We evaluated which verticals we were interested in, which ones we had contacts for, and which ones would be perfect to take advantage of our product. We worked through a huge array of business rules for our product and agreed on the top priorities. We went over our initial marketing plans and flushed them out in more detail. (Twitter is there if you’re curious.) We talked with Trademark lawyers to safe guard our brand names. Our accountant also dropped by to organize all things financial. We know it was a successful conversession because we left behind about 37 candy wrappers!
And at the end of it all, we took just a few more minutes at the computers before going home. And one last look at Jeremy’s wild shoes.
Isn’t this interesting! After the MatterMeter.com launch party we had in New York, we posted a few of our photos on Flickr. And guess what! One of them was selected for use in the 2009 Schmapp!! online travel guide.
There are just too many new MatterMeter features this week to talk about them all! In addition to our random matter widget, you can now download the widget for your favorite brand by clicking on ‘Get Meter’ to the right of the meter on the brand page. Of course, our favorite brand is MatterMeter. Click on the widget here to Matterize it yourself!
Another great feature added to MatterMeter this week was FaceBook Connect. This idea came straight from the Mashable review of MatterMeter by Adam Ostrow who wrote, “Given the very niche nature of MatterMeter, it would be far stickier – and likely attract far more votes – as a Facebook Connect application”.
There are now over 4,000 entries and 1,200 brands on MatterMeter. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to share some results with you. For instance, how do guys and gals differ in their ratings of Facebook? How likely are people to say Nike matters if they already say Apple matters? Coming soon!
It was big news last week when various people tried to use Google trends to predict who the winner of American Idol 2009 would be. Using volume of searches, accounting for known demographic and geographic information, and considering the trends from prior seasons, they felt it was pretty much a sure thing that Adam Lambert would win. Perhaps you heard the news, though, that Kris Allen won the talent contest.
Those of you who have been following MatterMeter may have noticed that MatterMeter correctly predicted the outcome, giving Adam a rating of 67% and Kris a rating of 86%. Let’s just say that to remain focused on the issue at hand here, we won’t talk about sample sizes or confidence intervals associated with these numbers. That’s our little secret.
How is it that so many people predicted incorrectly? Surely, the sample sizes on which the Google trends analyses were based ran into the thousands and possibly millions. Surely, search terms are a reasonable proxy for interest in a topic. Statistically, it seemed to be a reasonable bet.
The missing link, not the Lemur link also discovered this week, is that Google trends does not evaluate feelings or sentiments. Were people searching so fervently for Adam Lambert because he could be counted on to deliver a stunning vocal performance or because he could be counted on to deliver a strange song interpretation that would certainly go viral. Were people searching for Adam Lambert not because they were excited to purchase his upcoming CD but rather because they couldn’t believe that his songs might actually end up on a CD? (For the record, our team thinks Adam and Kris are fabulously talented!)
I’d advise you to keep an eye on MatterMeter and EvoListen next year. We just might get it right again.
For 24 hours, starting May 13, 2009, MatterMeter was on the TechCrunch CrunchCam. It was just too silly a proposition to pass up! Here are a few stills from the day, including the whiteboard going up, the dog going for a walk, the sombrero segway guy, and someone checking out the board.
The Conversition team had several exciting days last week, all related to MatterMeter! In reverse order….
Third, and most exciting, Mashable, which describes themselves as “the world’s largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Networking news with more than 5 million monthly pageviews,” in association with Microsoft BizSpark, selected www.MatterMeter.com for a review. What day did this happen? It happened May 7 which is Jean’s birthday! Of course! Adam Ostrow called MatterMeter ‘intriguing,’ ‘interesting,’ and ‘very frank.’ We’ve read the review about 43 times so now it’s your turn. Read it here.
Second, we launched a great new MatterMeter widget which you can easily download to your own blog, website, or homepage. Click here to get yours!
First, we welcomed a new member to the team, Jeremy, our MatterMeter man! Welcome to the ride Jeremy! It’s only just begun.
To celebrate the launch of MatterMeter, we announced on Twitter that we would give a MatterMeter t-shirt to the first person to DM us with the correct description of the easter egg on the website. Congratulations to FastIrish, a retired marine, for finding it! We will be giving away more t-shirts in the future so watch for your chance to get one!
We’re very excited about the interest taken in MatterMeter after being open to the public for only a week. We’ve already registered more than 4 000 visits and 30 000 page views! Google, 30 Rock, and IKEA have climbed to the top of our brand MatterBoard while Nike, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Fox have drifted to the bottom. If that doesn’t sit right with you, you will just have to visit MatterMeter and make sure you matterize them yourself!
Based on your feedback, we’ve made some great additions to MatterMeter this last week. More will follow, but here are just a few of the things we’ve added so far:
- Live feed of who is joining, matterizing, following and replying
- Random matters (we are researchers you know)
- Top and bottom matters for today, this week, and this month
- Favorite the brands you are most interested in
Welcome to Conversition Strategies! Today is the official Grand Opening of our company, what we hope will be a valuable marketing research source for brands and companies.
Today is also special because we are launching our very first website. MatterMeter.com gives people a place to share ideas about which brands matter and don’t matter to them. Why not visit the site, rate some brands, and tell us what matters to you? We hope you like it!
MatterMeter is just the beginning for us. We already have several innovative products in the design and development phase, including something called EvoListen. We are positive that EvoListen will offer you a whole new way of thinking about research. You’ll just have to wait until late summer to find out.
In the meantime, you can follow our journey here or on Twitter. We look forward to hearing from you!
, apps doing it that way miss out on the majority of people who talk about brands using words. This means that tweetfeel produces results that are more accurate than other applications doing a similar thing
