The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.  – The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries

According to wikipedia, a Unique selling proposition (USP), refers to “any aspect of an object that differentiates it from similar objects.” So go back to our previous coffee machine winter campaign example, what is the #1 word that can win a customer’s mind?

This is one of the main purposes conducting quantitative marketing research, which typically means to create a survey,  find a group of random people, invite them to answer a questionnaire and have some statisticians to come up with the conclusions.  Depending on the scope, market research costs anything from a few thousands up to millions of dollars, making it out of reach for many mid-sized to small businesses.  With the vast amount of personal opinions on twitter and a powerful analytics tool like Tribalytic, you can easily do research peoples real opinions in a few minutes. Here is how.

Given any search, Tribalytic will take a evenly distributed sample of 500 tweets and extract the top 52 keywords, providing a good summary of what people are talking about.  Here are the ones for “coffee machine”.  This can be a bit intimidating at first sight, but keep reading and we’ll group the words together in a way that soon you’ll be able to find the “hidden gems”.

Ignoring keywords with less than 2% (more on why this magic number later) the keywords can be put together into following groups:

• Nugget: broken, working, fixed, buy (bought)
• Where: office,
• When: week, today, morning
• Emotion: love, carefully,
• Noise: china, #pawpawty, bone are from the same kind of tweets like this which can be safely tossed away.

By sifting through the natural noise coming with the tweets, now we can see that a common theme of people talking about the physical status of their coffee machine.

Nuggets in the tweets

If you drill down by selecting keyword “broken”, you may find a tweet like this sent at 4am on a freezing Australian winter morning:

Compare the above message with this one and it’s no surprise that people are expressing their frustration about “broken down” coffee machines.

Remembering the quote at the beginning of this post,  what’s the word you should own? I’d say it has to be something that will bring out the warm, cozy feeling from owning a trustworthy, hard-to-break coffee machine.

Before we finish this post, we’ll have to talk about the 2% magic number.  As you have seen, the valuable information in tweets can come with irrelevant stuff.  So how do you make sure the conclusion you derive from analysing tweets is statistically significant? To put it another way, how can you be sure that the number we get is unlikely to occur by chance? The solution is to make sure that a minimum percentage of tweets have the words.  Based on the current sample size: 500, 2% means 10 tweets, which is the minimum number we can trust.  While this is not strictly speaking statistically correct,  it works well enough here as a simple rule of thumb.