A San Antonio, Texas, firm named PearAnalytics, whose company slogan appears to be �analytics, insights, intelligence� studied several thousand tweets from Twitter users and found that 40.55 percent of them were �Pointless Babble� (their caps, not mine.)
�Conversational� tweets were 37.55 percent, �Pass-Along Value� (retweets) was 8.7 percent, �Self Promotion� was 5.85 percent, �Spam� was 3.75 percent and �News� was 3.6 percent of the 2,000 tweets captured.
The study was a great idea, but the snotty name for the biggest category wasn�t exactly something you�d find in anthropology journals.
How about:
-- �relationship reinforcing�
-- �friendship building�
-- �social linking�
-- �pleasantries�
A boss of mine in the computer security field some years ago started writing and saying: �there is no privacy, get over it.�
None of us who worked for him could have anticipated the day when a marketing research firm would eavesdrop on Internet exchanges (yes, I know it�s public speech) and insult the people who just wanted to say �hi� or �I�m eating a sandwich� to their friends.
Sheesh! Lighten up! It�s a service named �Twitter.� You�re expecting maybe 140-character discussions of existentialism?
PearAnalytics report here.
Tom Kelchner
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