Federated Media and Palm are running a new tool called Trend Tracker that identifies and tracks emerging Twitter trends by tweet volume over time and geography, with the intent of predicting the next hot trend topics.
If this is primary research, then painting-by-numbers is art.
I know that we marketers are starved for consumer information. We're scared that they've abandoned us, or at least they aren't terribly interested in what we have to say about our brands. Twitter is one of those mechanisms that connects them to one another and, as such, can tell us what they care about.
But this tool is pointless, isn't it? It provides snapshots of discreet moments in time, presenting them in a way that suggests some casual or directional purpose but provides no insight into what's going on. The moments look like a pattern, but they're not. Further, what constitutes each shot are the most popular tweets, which themselves reflect what's most popular in the news, and what's been most often tweeted. It's secondary research, at best, or like a survey about how you like a survey about a survey.
The tool doesn't tell us what matters to people; if anything, it reveals how most everything pretty much doesn't matter for too long.
I'm sure there are experts who can wax poetic on the value of such snapshots, and that I'm a digital ingrate for not instinctively realizing it. I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been some "top ten ways to use Trend Tracker to strengthen the stalagmites of your brand" (which will be a link on Facebook, of course, and get tweeted). Well, I'm not really surprised, because I don't think that this tool is even intended to meet the lower threshold requirements for getting sold to gullible marketers.
It's a promotional tactic in support of Palm's Pre smartphone, and in that sense it's absolutely brilliant branding.
Instead of relying on those nonsense brand image ads it ran on TV for the product launch, this is an actual thing that does something, which is a hellluva lot more compelling. The fact that you don't need a Pre to use it is even smarter; I don't understand why more brands don't invent meaningful, relevant, and (at least somewhat) utilitarian experiences for consumers.
There's a little button on the web site to "learn more" about the Palm Pre; I would have hit the brand connection head-on, with some activity extensions:
- Users could get re-tweeted the top trend of the day, hour, minute, or nanosecond
- They could try to guess topics and win product-related awards
- Organize into groups to prompt trends, like spectators doing the wave at a baseball game
Who cares if it's a legitimate research tool (it's probably not)? It's just that calling tweet waves "trends" is like finding high drama in the familial dynamics of fruit flies. Don't blink, or you'll miss both.
The Bulb Asks:
- Are you able to extrapolate 'why' from the 'what' of something like tweet trends?
- How do you even define a trend? Do you base business decisions on them?
- Would you ever consider an activity like the Trend Tracker for your own brand, even if your business had nothing to do with technology? Why not?
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