Monday, April 06, 2009

Twitter feedback: it’s not just opt-in, it’s volunteer

I don’t know if commercial producers, ad agencies and their clients are gauging reaction to TV commercials on Twitter, but they should be.

Thinking the Kia hamster commercial was very cute—especially the cool passenger’s crisp little inverse nod of recognition to another hamster at a stop light—I took to Twitter to see if others reacted as I did. The Twitterati likes it mostly.

Strikes me it’s an incredibly objective view. If you’re a marketer, you reach out to consumers with a phone survey or recruit them for a focus group and you’ve attached a lot of importance to wanting to know. You look at blogs for a sense of the pulse and you have to figure the bloggers have attached a certain measure of importance to the act of writing about your product, or may even have some agenda. It takes some effort to publish a blog post. But a twitterer doesn’t make a big investment of time in blurting out a tweet. A collection of opinions tossed out in this way seems very real, honest.