Interactions - May/June 2010

ied demographic—valuable for
research, political inquiry, and
commercial investigations. In
fact, the integration of real-time
search results may be one of
the most innovative search-
technology advances in years.
As an example of the value of
status messages in the e-com-
merce domain, we conducted
an analysis of nearly 150,000
status messages from Twitter,
collected over 13 one-week peri-
ods for the brand names of 50
major companies. For each one-
week period and each brand, we
calculated an overall sentiment
of the status messages using a
five-point Likert-scale by means
of a Naïve Bayes classifier. As
shown in Table 2, there was sig-
nificant commenting on these
brands, making them a rich
source of brand-image data for
corporations in the area of cus-
tomer relationship and market
analysis.
This type of information,
once expensive to obtain, is
now freely available via status-
message platforms on the Web.
As such, the status message is
important for many sectors, not
just e-commerce.
Just as importantly, it appears
that these status messages have
an impact on people’s interac-
tions and behaviors. In a survey
of 34,514 myYearbook users in
the important 13- to 24-year-old
demographic, we asked par-
ticipants questions concerning
their use and the influence of
status messages on product and
purchase decisions. We asked
if participants had ever sought
opinions in status messages
prior to making a purchase,
whether or not they received
advice based on this status-mes-
sage request, and if the advice
they received was influential in
their purchase decisions.

About the Authors
Bernard J. (Jim) Jansen is
an associate professor in
the College of Information
Sciences and Technology
at The Pennsylvania State
Abdur Chowdhury is
Twitter’s chief scientist and
has been working the lines
between academia and
industry for most of his car-
rier. Hobbies include cave
diving, Aikido, and teaching his daughter
cool stuff.