Mintelligence - Minty Fresh Market Intelligence

We spend a lot of time looking at tweets. A LOT of time. Most of the tweets we look at relate to one business or another. We see a lot of scary stuff - both for the business owners and the tweeting employee.

This is the first in a series of twitter dos and don’ts, aimed mainly at the employee. Tip #1 - Assume your boss is reading your tweets. All the example tweets below are 100% real - with some tiny changes to protect the guilty innocent.

Tweeting about the interview

“Waiting to meet with a manager for interview at a hotel. This property is a baby in comparison to my old employer!”

Always assume that the interviewer has a twitter account and knows about the search function. Especially if you have your @username on your Resume. You really don’t want to have to answer this question. “So what do you mean by ‘this property is a baby’?” Even a relatively innocuous comment could backfire on you.

Tweeting about the new job

“Been a while since i tweeted, at a new job, not all that bad, but sucks anyway.”

So this tells me this tweeter has been at the new job just long enough to feel safe in wasting some time on twitter instead of ‘looking busy’.

Too much information

“So my new job title is Warehouse Manager. Still $1600 salary but more commission. Maybe I’ll stick around a little longer.”

If a coworker is reading your tweets they now know that you get more / less than she does. If your boss is reading this they now know that you’re thinking about leaving. If the other Warehouse Assistant is reading this and wanted the Manager title they might kill you. Probably not, but they might hate you a little!

Getting personal

“my manager just called and told me the new girl quit. Oh well, she was a liability and an idiot”

Three tweets before this we find out the new girls name, and the town she’s from. Six tweets earlier we find out where they work. As a customer of this establishment should I be wondering why a ‘liability’ was allowed to quit?

Remember - tweet + tweet = context

April “I got the job at ACME”
June “my new boss is called Hugh Joss - one letter out from a bart prank call”
December “i hate my boss”

So by looking through your tweets we figure out that you hate Hugh Joss, the general manager at ACME - where you work. I’m pretty sure we could find his email address pretty quickly.

You get the idea.

The simplest advice is to keep work and personal life separate. Potential employers can very quickly do a search for keywords like ‘manager’ ‘work’ ‘i hate my boss’ and find out if you are likely to say the same about them. Try this search for “hate boss” on twitter. Fun huh!

As more companies understand the power of getting their staff to tweet out a discount coupon they will worry more about the tweets either side of that coupon.

Let common sense prevail. If you turn up for work hungover - it’s probably not a good idea to tweet the fact.

Or if you have to - develop a code.

“totally in clover this morning!”

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You need big numbers to make money with Twitter right? You need 1M followers. You need thousands of RT junkies following you. And you need to tweet every 10 minutes to make sure you get spotted.

Maybe.

We think you can use twitter to help your business in a less ’sledgehammer’ manner.

Take John. John has a small web business selling collectible CDs. He signed up to twitter a year ago, he tweets enthusiastically when he gets new stock. He hasn’t followed many people, or promoted himself heavily. But somehow he has over 3000 followers.

If he tweets about a sale, how many of those 3000 followers will read that tweet? Our guess is not many. Our guess is that 10% of those followers are bots with ‘hot profiles’ who never read tweets. Our guess is that 10% of those followers are bots with ‘great coupons all day’ who never read tweets. Maybe 10% are customers of his shop who followed him to see the latest offers. But our guess is that most of the rest are following John randomly thanks to auto follow services like twollow.com - and that most of those are interested in ‘the cure’ or ‘white stripes’ rather than ‘collectible cds’.

In short - 3000 followers? Big deal!

So John has two options. Either try to boost that 3,000 to 30,000 and then 300,000 in an attempt to brute force his message through - he’d rather talk to 1% of 30,000 than 1% of 3,000.

Or he can aim to find his niche audience in smarter ways to turn 3,000 ineffective followers into 3,000 potential customers.

But how?

Our approach is very simple. We let John find the people on twitter who we know are interested in Johns service. They are people who tweet @ him, they RT his tweets, they link to his website, they mention his brandname. This list is very different from a follower list. This is a list of twitter users who genuinely engage with Johns brand.

We then profile these individuals more widely - finding common interests and trends. We find the other brands they love, the blogs they link to, the blogs they quote. We find the twitter accounts they RT. In short - we find out where they spend their attention.

We then find other people who do the same. If 80% of your customers read / quote / link / rt boingboing - and they account for 0.0002% of boingboings readership - isn’t it worthwhile for John to send Cory or Mark a photo of his really cool wall of classic CDs arranged by color. Or arranged by size of face. Or arranged by value. Or arranged by the number of eyes on the cover.

We don’t come up with the genius promo idea. But we show you where you should probably be targeting. We give you numbers for potential reach. We help shape your activity. And we do it in real time - if everyone is suddenly buying MJ CDs you’ll see it in your Mintelligence report in minutes.

Doesn’t that sound better than chasing a million random followers using potentially slightly suspect techniques.

And in fact, if you DM us we’ll be happy to talk ideas too.

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Over the past 6 months Mintelligence has gone through a number of revisions in our alpha and beta testing. Our vision of providing actionable market intelligence through the analysis of social networking exchanges has never changed - but the shape of our software and reports has been transformed.

The latest incarnation provides a linear path between logging onto Mintelligence and identifying those individuals on Twitter who have most influence over your target customers.

The foundations of spotting the mentions of your brands, finding your loudmouthed employees, reacting quickly to unhappy customers, and finding press mentions are all covered. And have been for some time.

But now we take things further. We identify the core group of people who have recently engaged with your brand, products, and name online. We give you numbers - how many people would you potentially reach if 10% of this group retweeted. How likely are they to retweet. Who are the most important individuals. Is it worth DMing them?

We look at what else the group engages with. And we use that to find you similar people who should be prime potential customers. We also tell you who they follow, who they retweet, and so who you should be sending that discount coupon or press release to.

And further than that - we do this for your competitors too - allowing you to benchmark your performance in detail.

The twitter DDOS issues have confused our timeline for release somewhat - so check back here or follow @mintelligence for earliest news of the release.

If you are impatient and would like an early peek at the new Mintelligence please get in touch via the beta registration, we may be able to let you in early.

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A bit of clever PR was perpetrated on the Tshirt buying public over the past few weeks, so how did our chart react?.
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Tags: blog, charts, statistics, t-shirts
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