ideaction

Is twitrratr possibly the most useless piece of analysis software ever? Well maybe things will move on but check it out for yourself. Twitrratr is designed to 'track opinions on twitter'. The logic of this claim would dictate that you should get a good temperature read on any given subject.

My subject of choice was 'the irish government'. A topic like this should result in some level of polarisation in opinion - given the economic recession, the governments' abject failure in the opinion polls and Brian Cowen's popularity ratings. Nope. Not on twitrratr. 86% of twitter posts about the Irish Government are neutral.

What does this tell us? Well it tells us something very important...social media like twitter are probably best used for understanding consumer attitudes at a qualitative level. The nature of this kind of media is to give people time and space to comment in their own language. They can post opinions and converse with other people. This is the domain of qualitative research.

As a tool for qualitative enquiry, social media is very strong. But, like any form of qualitative research, it relies upon the interpretative skills of the researcher. Mechanised tools like twitrratr will tell you very little on their own. However, a good qualitative researcher could learn quite a lot by reading the so called 'neutral' posts and starting a conversation with the folks who have tweeted some of them. Who you speak to is the key.

Twitter has huge potential to help us understand consumers, voters and people in general. Indeed, entire research agencies have been established to use social media (such as twitter) to help with co-creation. All of this is evidence of the opportunity for qualitative research. The challenge, however, is to avoid services like twitrratr giving 'tracking opinions on twitter' a bad name.