Twitter as a monitor
Three researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new (albeit uberly complex) tool that uses Twitter to predict company sales. Their model uses Twitter’s keywords to predict sales, whether to increase inventories or place items on sale.
Their model accurately predicted sales of three movies that came out on the same day- “The Hangover,” “Land of the Lost” and “My Life in Ruins.” They run on over 20 servers and observe patterns to predict consumer behavior.
Valerie Kusler, Senior Account Manager at PR/Marketing Company, Ketner Group said, “retailers have long used e-Commerce sales as an indicator of what in-store sales might look like before investing in costly widespread inventory allocation for certain kinds of merchandise, so the evolution to Twitter is an obvious one. It’s too soon to tell exactly how much of an indicator Twitter buzz will really be or what types of sales it will predict most accurately, but sellers should certainly take note of this study and at least start monitoring the correlation between their Twitter trends and sales trends.”
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Consumerism, Geo-mapping columnist
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[...] Twitter is psychic in that researchers show Twitter users’ use accurately predicts sales and can determine whether or not stores need to increase or decrease inventory, have a sale, etc. It’s a new model but we predict more of this monitoring capability will hit the market in 2010 or 2011. [...]