What’s our Secret Sauce?

What will be the secret to Tweet Satisfaction’s success? I hope the answer is simple.

We set out to answer two questions: 1) What good and bad things were written about “xyz” on Twitter? 2) What is the trend of  “happy” and “mad” tweets about “xyz” over time?

Like many seemingly simple questions, mining the data to find an answer was not easy.

• Twitter‘s character count limit encourages users to save time and key strokes. This produces many 140 character run-on sentence fragments and creative ways of shortening proper names.
• Twitter‘s search API limits the number of tweets returned per API call  and does not return search results beyond an every shrinking time frame.
• Most tweets about “xyz” are neutral. Most tweets (roughly 95-99%) share links to news and announcements, post questions, or provide updates on what someone is doing, did or hopes to do.   Tweet Satisfaction is only interested in the rare tweets about “xyz” that include “happy” or “mad” emotions.

Working nights and weekends, our small team experimented with a variety of solutions to these challenges. Some worked better than others, and we’ll continue to refine the algorithms that identify whether a tweet is about “xyz” and whether the tweet is “happy” or “mad”.

The biggest challenge (other than attracting a large number of happy users) is avoiding the temptation to add more features.

There are a number of enterprise solutions that attempt to answer our questions and do a lot more. We view the best of these solutions as potential strategic partners (not competitors). For example, Scout Lab helps a few hundred enterprises use “social media to build better products and stronger customer relationships.” You might also consider Radian6 or Sysomos if you have the need and budget.

To stay focused on simplicity and value, we draw inspiration from Survey Monkey,  Basecamp, Highrise, Mint, and DropBox.

We hope to follow in their footsteps and benefit several thousands (or millions) entrepreneurs, small businesses, journalists, bloggers, analysts, policy makers and – last but not least – people who are simply curious.

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