Making sense of Twitter data

Marketers are trying very hard to make sense of the twitter data, but the range of "emotions" conveyed by the tweets and the lack of quantitative framework, make it extremely difficult to measure and apply the insights into real-life business improvements.

But, there are cool new ways evolving and recently, Harvard Business review had an interesting blog on "four ways of looking at twitter." Here's the link to the full article (http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/02/visualizing-twitter.html). The author talks about a couple of new visual aids (ex., Twitter Venn diagrams) being developed that may provide some quantitative feel to the tweets!

I decided to test my theory on "lack of analytics in strategic, operational and ecommerce decision-making" by running the Twitter Venn for the terms strategy, analytics and ecommerce. Below is the Twitter Venn that comes up:



This is a bit surprising even to me - the frequency of analytics and ecommerce tweets is relatively small, but more telling is the lack of overlap in analytics/strategy/ecommerce. I have worked with businesses where double-digit gains are easily achieved by merging the above three concepts. The tweeters, with a stake in strategy, analytics and ecommerce, just need to be thinking more congruence and overlap to realize those benefits.


Incidentally, I have been helping businesses build sustainable growth models by applying analytics to ecommerce strategy and planning (http://www.wsapartners.com for more info).