Some results from the Fiesta Movement activity

I already blogged about the Fiesta Movement social media activity. Now there are some results, published at adrants:

The program — which included a test-drive program — has elicited the interest of about 50,000 potential buyers, 97% of which don’t drive a Ford at present.

In toto, official Fiesta Movement content has drawn 4.3 million YouTube views, 540,000 flickr views and 3 million Twitter impressions.

These are quite remarkable results, indeed!

And all this is achieved with „$0 ad spent and a fraction of marketing costs“. I assume it really does compare well to traditional advertising efforts.

Yet communicating a figure of $0 seems to send out the wrong signal. The total costs (for 100 cars, the website, the staff at Ford, etc.) might be „a fraction“ of what is usually spend, but somehow I can’t imagine this whole campaing having been „cheap“.

Tweets about brands are about information, not sentiment

Quite a few brands are probably carefully eyeing twitter trends with reference to their brand name, incase of negative remarks.

Now there is a study looking into how users are actually talking about brands on twitter. At ReadWriteWeb there is a post stating that tweets about brands are more often about information rather than sentiment.

According to the study, which looked at 150,000 tweets, 11.1% of the brand-related tweets were information-providing while 18.1% were information-seeking. The latter of these two is especially useful to companies looking to understand what questions and concerns customers have about their products. However, the large majority of the tweets – 48.5% – were simply comments made in passing which mentioned the brand but whose primary focus was something else.

In only roughly 23% users were expressing sentiment (positive or negative) about brands.

So why is that? Why don’t people express so many negative opinions on twitter as compared to the rest of the web? ReadWriteWeb assumes that it is the easy and quick handling of twitter which results in many more positive or neutral, fact based chatter.

That does make sense to me. People will go through a lot of effort, writing long and nasty blog posts, when they’re fed up. But they won’t do the same for positive or even neutral remarks, unless the brand experience was rather extraordinary.