Twitter as Market Research

The team at Twitter is reading 2,000 tweets a day to gauge user’s opinions on their various advertising commercials. Hulu offers visitors the option of viewing one long commercial (about 2 minutes) before a show starts or to view multiple commercials throughout the show. Hulu also hired a firm to test consumers’ recall of the ads. The aim is to show that online ads are more memorable and worth what Hulu hopes to charge advertisers.

So by using the power of Twitter, Hulu is able to cut the cost of market research tremendously if you look at the huge overhead CBS has with their Las Vegas research center in the MGM Grand.

According to Business Week, every year since 2001, CBS has recruited up to 70,000 Vegas tourists, who sample pilots or upcoming promos for CBS shows in exchange for discounts on Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and CBS kitsch. The testers twist a knob to the right if they like the show, left if they hate it. Over the years, the lab results have helped CBS muster a stream of hits.

Thanks to the team at Tweetscan, you can easily scan for any keyword and see what people are talking about, and when.

For this quick tip, enter in the keyword you’re looking for, I used “Grooveshark”. Then, once you find the people talking about Grooveshark, jump on your Twitter account and start @ replying to these people and getting the conversation going.

People definitely take notice when you are active in the community, and soon your users will start talking about you talking to them. These days, people don’t naturally expect companies to be listening to them, and they’re more than happy to hear from their favorite startups.

So jump on Tweetscan, type in your favorite keyword, and start generating that buzz for your startup!

While I just recently profiled Tweetscan, and how it can be used to track your customers and fans, I get introduced to another cool product, Addictomatic, which lets you check a particular search term, like “Grooveshark” across a bunch of different properties:

Topix
Ask.com
Live.com
Google Blog Search
Digg
Technorati
Bloglines
Flickr
Blinx
Truveo
Youtube
Newsvine
Wordpress
Yahoo!

:whew: quite the list, and I’m sure they’re going to be adding more soon..

Regardless, I’ve never really seen any good explanation or reasoning behind using Twitter until now …

This video, created by a fan, is a strong showing from the Twitter community. I can only hope we build this type of die-hard community at Grooveshark:

I have like 1,000 following, friends, updates, messages, whatever, I still don’t get the point. If I’m not sitting at my desk watching the stream go by, it’s utterly useless. If I have a question, I ask it on LinkedIN. If I care to tell my friends what’s going on, I post it to Facebook, etc.

An interesting poll on Read Write Web asks if Twitter will ever go mainstream or be adopted by your parents, and to that I say, simply, “no”.

Products like Twitter are for a niche base, and a niche base that isn’t really the most desirable audience. The same guys that are on Digg are using Twitter, and these guys ain’t the coveted “young male demo”. They’re the technophile, wikipedia-writing uber geeks. No offense to those of you out there, the very fact that I’m writing this post probably classifies me in that category as well.

I’m going to be doing a followup post about web 2.0 niche products and their overall adoption for the mainstream as a followup to this, so stay posted.

Also, be sure to add me on Twitter ! ::wink wink::

…seriously though, add me — or at least on Linkedin, a real network

For more, check out the original article from ParisLemon: Twitter and Pownce Wooing The Development Crowd, Soon the Users.