Twitter itself has seen tremendous adoption growth in the past couple of months, most driven by the cult of celebrity that has grown up around people such as Ashton Kutcher and Shaquille O’Neal.

And according to this ComScore post by Sarah Radwanick, this growth is occurring across a wide swath of US demographics:

What this broad demographic representation means is that Twitter may now be set to become the new holy grail for researchers looking for insights into what a wide range consumers are thinking and talking about.

The first application is monitoring the Twitter conversation around brands and ideas, which can be done very cheaply and efficiently.

The next level will be to approach Twitter as a focus group.  Tropicana found this out the hard way, with consumer feedback on Twitter coming fast and furious in the wake of its recent package change.

As Peter Shankman points out in this New York Times article on the Tropicana package change:

“Twitter is the ultimate focus group,” Mr. Shankman said. “I can post something and in a minute get feedback from 700 people around the world, giving me their real opinions.”

However, in the case of marketers like Tropicana, the trick will be to harness the insight power of Twitter before the product, package, or advertising makes it way into broader distribution.

This is a very real world situation that marketers and marketing researchers will soon find themselves in, according to this post from Tom Cunniff at the iCPG blog.

This applies to social media in general as well.  For broader monitoring, I wanted to build on a social media monitoring approach that I’ve blogged about before and that recently Chris Brogan did a good job outlining as well.

But rather than using Google Blog Search, I’d suggest using the new RSS feed functionality that Google Alerts rolled out a couple of months ago, in order to aggregate the significant amount of online content that exists outside of formal blogs.

1.)  Develop Key Words To Track

This could be a brand name (”Energizer”) or a specific topic “homemade barbecue sauces”.  Start by typing the word or phrase in quotes in Google to see how relevant results are with the phrase.

If your brand name is also a word with multiples meanings such as “Tide”, you may need to add something like the word detergent to keep from capturing conversations on surfing or beach combing.

You can also track:

• A URL for a Website
• A person’s name or online nickname

2.)  Getting the search feeds:

Once you have the keywords, it’s simply a matter of setting up a search feed with different social media monitoring tools.  For the three listed below, that means adding your keywords to their search box and then clicking on the RSS subscription button to get the auto-link:

• Google Alerts - for online news, videos, images, and other sources
• Technorati - for monitoring blog postings
• Twitter Search - for brand chatter on the Twitter micro-blogging platform

3.)  Aggregating Feeds In Google Reader

By collecting these feeds into one folder on Google Reader, you can monitor all your brand related mentions from social media in one convenient place.

Another good aggregation tool would be Friendfeed, especially for those who are trying to distribute their monitored content to a far flung group.

That way you can send your boss the link, and he’ll never even get to ask if you’re on top of social media and your brand.

A great presentation last week by Bill Tancer of Hitwise Intelligence has broken me out of the winter posting doldrums.

His topic on levering search data for consumer insights is one of my key interest areas on the bleeding edge of marketing research, and he did a great job of demonstrating the predictive power of modeling search data trends.

One of his most compelling talking points, reflecting the current state of the economy, showed an updated chart from this older analysis on the correlation of unemployment website visits with actual unemployment claims.

Google has gone here before as well, with their demonstration of the Google Flu Trends application, and how search data can be predictive of CDC confirmation of regional flu outbreaks by a couple of weeks.

Both of these examples illustrate how the modeling of aggregated search queries can be an incredible source of insights into consumer intent.

There are a couple of white space areas for marketing research with search data, and all worthy of further pursuit.  For me these include:

• Analyzing search terms associated with digital marketing campaigns at the metro area level in order to link digital behavior to a store level or DMA based marketing mix model.
• Identifying the most predictive search terms (”grocery coupons”) that best correlate with widely tracked consumer attitude and behavior metrics (Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index) in order to understand where consumer sentiment is heading before the competition does.

For a better understanding of the modeling technique behind Google Flu Trends, download the PDF and Excel files that illustrate their method as it appeared in the February 19th issue of Nature.

According to a study entitled “The Impact of Social Media on Purchasing Behavior” done by OTX Research on behalf  DEI Worldwide, the answer is yes.

The study confirms that consumers currently use social media as a top resource for information on brands, companies, or products:

What it also concludes is that social media outreach by brands and companies, especially if this outreach is done by a personal online representative, can be much more influential on consumer behavior than ads or other promotional devices.

In fact, 2/3rds of consumers are likely to pass the information they receive from these representatives on to others and over half are likely to take action on this information.

Attitudes towards information they receive from online brand representatives

• Likely to pass this information on to others - 67%
• Likely to share their opinions - 63%
• Value information more than ads - 62%
• Likely to take action - 57%

Currently, most companies are viewing social media as something to manage or handle damage control, like many of the top brands involved with Twitter.

However, by using social media as a proactive outreach to share valued information, the impact of social media on consumer behavior can be significantly stronger.

What followed was a viral social media response that most marketers can only dream about.

In just 48 hours they had:

• Over 100,000 views on YouTube for both their ad, along with all the video blog responses to their ad
• Number 1 (motrin) and Number 2 (motrinmoms) topic trends on Twitter, according to Twitter Search.
• Over 8,000 individual blog posts about the ad and Motrin itself according to Technorati.

Additionally, they had the undivided attention of many of the leading pundits in the digital marketing blogosphere, including Seth Godin, Jeremiah Owyang, Brand Flakes, Adfreak, ReadWriteWeb, Hard Knox Life, David Armano, Frank Martin, The Consumerist, Adrants, Mashable, Viral Blog, Peter Kim, Adverganza, Brand Experience, Rogue Agency, and many more.

Now to the fine print:

This social media marketing campaign was all a big, unintended mistake.  And as you may guess, the overwhelming response was negative.

Motrin is now backpedaling, pulling the ad from their site, posting apologies all over the place, and they and their agencies are probably in an all points scramble mode.

Which is all too bad, because, if you just looked at the response numbers, Motrin had a lock on social media marketer of the year with this one.

Search Engine Optimization 2.0 and Search Engine Marketing 2.0 as concepts have dominated digital media over the last couple of years.  And now with Google Flu Trends the concept of Search Engine Research 2.0 is truly coming into its own.

Google Flu Trends is based upon the aggregation and analysis of the search behavior of people who type the flu symptoms they are experiencing into Google in order to confirm their self diagnosis and to look up potential treatment options.

Google has found there is a close relationship between the amount of people searching on flu symptom related keywords and the amount who actually have the flu itself.

In the chart above you can see how Google Flu Trends has been well correlated with data from the Center of Disease Control on the level of flu cases being reported in the US over the past several years.

The advantage with Google Flu Trends is that the data is available a couple of weeks ahead of what the CDC compiles and announces.

Google Flu Trends is a good demonstration of the potential of the large and relatively untapped potential of levering search data for marketing research and consumer insights.

I look at what Google is doing with its Flu Trends tracker as bit of kicking the tires and taking their data for a test drive around the block.

When researchers finally take this information out on to open road and push things to the limit, that’s when we will really start realizing the full potential of search engine research.

But of all the unique aspects of this campaign, one thing that stood out was the use of data and how that influenced strategy, especially with the Obama campaign.

His unique electoral strategy of looking outside the typical swing states into areas where Republicans have always been strong (Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia) was driven by statistical analyses that showed how changing demographics in these typically Republican areas provided opportunities for a Democrat willing to take advantage of them.

I tend not to be very politically minded, but one site that fascinated me throughout the election season was Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com blog (538 being the number of electors in the Electoral College).

Throughout the campaign, he aggregated all the available polls and then analyzed them using regression analyses to find out what their outlier tendencies tended to be.

He then weighted the polls and re-simulated the election 10,000 times per update in order to, in his words, “provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952″.

And his accuracy throughout the election process was remarkable.  According to this New York Times article entitled “This Math Whiz Called It For Obama Months Ago”, in the primary election versus Hilary Clinton, Silver “projected Senator Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was within about a dozen of the actual vote estimates”.

Additionally, when the returns came in on election night, it was found that “Mr. Silver had predicted the popular vote within one percentage point, predicted 49 of 50 states’ results correctly, and predicted all of the resolved Senate races correctly”.

What will be interesting to see is how this new approach to the analysis of polling data will have an effect on future elections.  What is certain is that the data driven approach to election strategy is probably here to stay.

According to Forrester Research it is:

With only 11% of consumers using RSS, and of the remaining 89% of those who don’t use RSS feeds, only 17% of them saying they are interested in using them in the future, it looks like broadly distributed online content has a dark future.

However, I have to take a different tack then Steve Rubel or Forrester on this.  If I were to survey US consumers right after World War II on whether they think they would use a television, and for those who don’t, do they think they would in the future, I’d probably get roughly the same data back as Forrester got on RSS.

I agree that RSS is a geeky term and most of the broader base of the US public still don’t use RSS readers.

But just like Apple was able to use consumer insights to make music downloads and the mobile internet interesting to the broader public, and Google was able to make search engines decidedly not techie, I think there is a great opportunity for someone to take all the content currently available in RSS format and make it as easy to access as the evening news on TV.

RSS in its current form may not be the answer, but that doesn’t mean we should be reading its obituary.

What if you asked a question about a brand and the brand answered back?

On Twitter these days, that’s exactly what is happening.  Twitter has evolved from a a microblogging tool that allowed first adopters to share exactly what was going on in their lives in 140 character or less, into an increasingly mainstream conversation tool that companies and brands are just beginning to use to connect to consumers.

Some brands have made mistakes along the way, while others have had their brands hijacked by others (e.g. “Janet” of Exxon Mobil).

But the brands listed below have all used Twitter to engage their consumers directly, in ways that traditional brand communication tools could never have been able to do as effectively or efficiently:

1.) Comcast - comcastcares

Comcast has made a significant dent in its negative perception of poor customer service with a Twitter presence that is really turning heads.  For starters they use a real person, with a real photo instead of a logo. Check out this NY Times article for a more about Comcast’s presence on Twitter.

2.) Zappos - zappos

Here is a great post from AdFreak about how Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh becomes a “one-man-customer- service machine” on Twitter.

3.) Southwest Airlines - southwestair

As usual, Southwest Airlines takes one of the most maligned industries out there and puts a smiling (and branded) face on it.

4.) Dell Computers - Dell on Twitter

Dell lists out all Dell related Twitter accounts, ranging from those talking about the latest deals and promotions, to international Dell news, and Dell focused bloggers.

5.) Oracle - Oracle Tweeters

A complete list by Oracle of all their employees with external blogs and Twitter accounts.

6.) Whole Foods - wholefoods

A great mix of answering consumer questions, posting news of interest, and sharing links to favorite recipes.

7.) British Prime Minister’s Office - downingstreet

Not necessarily a brand or company, but I like the official government presence on Twitter.  I found this Tweet interesting: “Cabinet reshuffle is taking place today. We will have details of confirmed movements and appointments on the website later…”

8.) Forrester Research - forrester

One of the top digital marketing research agencies, Forrester Research, levers Twitter as both a way to monitor chatter about its brand, as well as a way to keep a pulse on the broader digital conversation.

9.) method - methodtweet

This green consumer goods manufacturer Tweets on everything from environmental factoids, to the latest update on their corporate dodgeball team.

10.) HR Block - HRBlock

I would imagine this Twitter account will really heat up as we get closer to the April 15th tax deadline next year.

Twitter is still in an early phase from a broad reach adoption curve standpoint.  However, mainstream brands are staking out effective presences and levering Twitter’s ability to foster meaningful interactions with a wide range of people.

If there are other brands who you think are doing a good job on Twitter, please feel free to comment or just send me a Tweet @ paulbanas.

The elements of a viral video that allows it to reach that level fall into two buckets: above board best practices and below board ways to game the system.

The above board elements of a viral video include:

Can Answer A Simple Question: “Why would someone want to share this video with others?” - whether it’s funny, controversial, racy, unique, or just plain strange, all viral videos must be “share worthy”.  There is a certain element of “badge value” that comes from sharing something with your friends that you know that they would enjoy, especially if you are the first.  A video then becomes a form of social currency, to hopefully be exchanged exponentially.

Video Is Well “Branded” - the title and the thumbnail video image need to jump past the other video competition.  By understanding thumbnail optimization and how to write an engaging title, you can set up a video for success.  Like any other form of advertising, the title and the thumbnail have only a couple seconds to register someone’s interest before they move on to something else.

Social Media Outreach - a video has about 48 hours to profit from being on the “Most Watched” video page, so thinking ahead on ways to share it through outlets like Facebook, MySpace, Stumbleupon, and Digg can definitely provide a kick start.  However, the line between sharing a video with those who may be interested and outright spamming can be very thin indeed.

Which brings me to the below board elements of a viral video.  In his post on TechCrunch, Dan Ackerman Greenberg covers some of the points above, but also goes into ways how his firm artificially pumped up viewership through usage of multiple accounts and comment manipulation.  What is also interesting was his mea culpa follow up post after the blizzard of negative comments he received.

For a deeper understanding of YouTube and the sociology behind it, this video done by Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is both a fascinating story, as well as a great source of insights into YouTube itself: