Twitter, Sentiment, Motrin

An interesting post from Christine Sierra at Lexalytics regarding analysing sentiment on tweets – all about this ad from Motrin:

Personally, the ad seems insulting and dumb. It seems to say: please have a painful lifestyle so that we can sell you drugs.

As this post by Tom Martin suggests, the whole saga (campaign, twitter-storm, campaign pulling) may become something of a case study and certainly an opportunity for accurate social media analysis to really help.

Comments

[Daniel Tunkelang]

I agree that this incident is a watershed moment for social media, which is essentially my point in a recent post at The Noisy Channel: http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/11/20/tweet-first-ask-questions-later/

But I am among those who think that the analysts are overreaching. In particular, as some commenters responded to Christine, we don't know the correlation between Twitterers' sentiment and their membership in Motrin's target audience. And the backlash from an active vocal minority may be disproportionate.

All in all, I think Motrin did a fine job of damage control, though perhaps they could have invested more in focus groups to not have damage to control in the first place. But the bigger question is what social media will do with this new-found respect for its power.

[tom martin]

Mathew,

Thank you for thinking enough of my post to link to it from your blog. I do think this will become a case study of sorts, or at least a discussion topic around the social media round-table.

- Tom Martin