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