WASHINGTON – The future of @datamining for #marketing firms could lie in increments of 140 characters or less.
Twitter has contracted with two research firms that are analyzing user information – such as geographic location – and tweets up to two years old.
Gnip and DataSift, Inc. – based in Colorado and the U.K., respectively – have been licensed by the micro-blogging service to categorize and bundle tweets. Within a month, the two firms will start selling the data to companies and marketing firms.
The latest monetization of the platform drew the ire of privacy advocates last week, as marketers will have a growing ability to gauge consumer opinion and trends in real time.
The data bundles can amount to real-time focus groups broken up by product and even geography. Chevrolet could examine 140-character reactions to its Volt in Detroit, for example, while McDonald’s might do the same for its McRib in Houston.
The sheer amount of information produced by Twitter users has made it difficult to analyze the data to this point. Twitter averages around a quarter billion tweets per day, its CEO told TechCrunch in October.
The free social network allows users few privacy options, and open accounts – which are used by most of its 100 million users – publish information straight to the public domain.
“People may consider tweets to be personal property, but this deal makes clear they are not,” Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch Campaign Group, told the Daily Mail. “It’s clear that if you’re not paying for a service, you are not the customer – you’re the product.”
Twitter has refused to comment on resulting privacy concerns thus far. But Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift, told Reuters that no personal conversations or deleted tweets can be accessed.
“The only information that we make available is what’s public,” Bailey said. “We do not sell data for targeted advertising. I don’t even know how that would work.”
DataSift will launch a cloud-based service next month from which companies can analyze tweets dating back to January 2010. The service will allow firms to “unlock trends from public tweets” and help harness the “Twitter Firehose,” according to its website.
More than 700 companies are already on a waiting list to try DataSift’s service, Reuters reported.
“Twitter has really become an incredibly valuable information source,” said Bailey told CNN. “There are a flood of companies wanting to get more use from it.”
The privacy concerns resulting from Twitter’s monetization come as Google and Facebook face mounting criticism regarding their respective policies. The former has begun tracking users’ search queries, while the latter’s “Timeline” feature makes it easier than ever to view users’ online histories.
The move by Twitter is emblematic of a larger trend in marketing. As Internet users put increasingly more information online, their conversations, interests and locations will become easier to monitor. Information that was previously inaccessible is now at marketing firms’ fingertips.
As a result, companies will have a leg up in monitoring consumer trends – perhaps even before consumers themselves understand the sheer amount of information they’re putting online.
Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for British-based Internet security company Sophos Ltd., told Reuters that this issue will continue to grow as Twitter and other social media evolve.
“Online companies know which websites we click on, which adverts catch our eye, and what we buy,” Cluley said. “Increasingly, they’re also learning what we’re thinking. And that’s quite a spooky thought.”
