@christineptran

Twitter looking more like Google everyday

The news broke last night about Twitter’s Promoted Tweet, and it’s all over Techmeme today. You can read about why it’s significant here and here, and from Twitter itself.

Basically, Promoted Tweets are “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.”  For example, a Promoted Tweet will be displayed at the top of the Twitter search page when people search for key words. Like Google Adsense, the most relevant Promoted Tweets will be displayed based on a metric Twitter is calling Resonance.

This new marketing tool will be especially good for situations when brands need a particular tweet to stick, for example, to promote a campaign or to combat negative PR.

I really like the idea of Resonance, which for me has a combined connotation of relevancy, reach, and engagement. In Twitter’s own words: “If users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.”

If Twitter sees success with Promoted Tweets on its search page, expect to see Twitter using Resonance as a justification to drop Promoted Tweets into our own Twitter streams.  That is, if this line from today’s New York Times is true: “Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.”

Though I’m happy to accept a few relevant tweets a day in my Twitter stream from companies I don’t follow, expect user backlash when Twitter ads are unveiled.

Finally, think about this: In today’s BITS blog, this article portrays a Twitter that is looking more and more like Google everyday. Instead of the chronological, real-time tweet delivery that we’re all used to, imagine a Twitter stream that serves up tweets based on Resonance.

“’The timeline itself is not going to be a static product,’” said Sean Garrett, who heads communications at Twitter. ‘There might be different ways that people see and receive what’s relevant to them.’”

Expect to see more convergence between Twitter and Google, Resonance and PageRank, and ad-based search on both networks.

Facebook’s Sentiment Engine

On Sunday – Valentine’s Day, Facebook published new results from its sentiment engine, measuring if relationship status correlates with happiness. According to their analysis, it does. Read more.

These results follow from their USA Gross National Happiness Index, published in October 2009. Facebook data scientists have put together a sentiment engine which analyzes word choice in status updates. The idea, generally accepted by social psychologists, is that what we write provides a window into our “emotional and cognitive worlds.”

According to Facebook, positive words include “happy”, “yay” and “awesome,” while negative words include “sad,” “doubt” and “tragic.”  Read more about how words are collected and rated by LIWC, or the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count.  This tool was adopted by Facebook in its own research.

[If you hadn't read the report last year, It's no surprise that the happiest days fall on holidays, with Thanksgiving ranking at the top. The saddest day was January 22, 2008 - the day of the Asian stock market crash and Heath Ledger's death (really?). The second saddest was Michael Jackson's death.]

I plugged in all my Facebook status updates from November 1, 2009 to today and came up with the following analysis via LIWC:

And for good measure, here is an analysis of my tweets:

Nothing earth shattering here, but keep in mind this is one tool and I’m using the free version. (How I’m equally personable and arrogant/distant beats me!) Plus, you can’t deny the significance of this kind of data across 400 million Facebook users worldwide. Instead of knowing what people are searching for (per Google), Facebook tells us what people are thinking. This kind of information is valuable to everyone from social psychologists, to cultural anthropologists, to politicians, to marketers.

Companies should already be monitoring sentiment around their brands wherever people are talking. Facebook. Twitter. Forums. Comments. Buzz? I’m not sure what tools exist to do this well – so if you’re using one to monitor sentiment around your brand, please let me know.

Facebook currently hoards its social analytics, but you can bet that a sentiment engine will be on the market in the future.

Oh, and if you’re interested in reading more: This NY Times article discusses how a happiness index might be a better measure of “national self-worth” than economic indices.