Check whether the Twitter conversations about you are positive or negative with twendz
12/03/2009![]()
I have seen web design companies and online marketing agencies coming out with their online properties geared towards mass usage. So why shouldn’t a PR agency? So now Waggener Edstrom has come out with twendz, an online tool that you can use to find out the tone of the tweets around yourself, your brands, or a topic.
I ran my username on twendz and it brought up the latest RTs and replies to me on Twitter and summarized that 11% of my conversations are likely negative, while 59% are positive and 30% are neutral.
How did twendz come up with this? According to its site, ‘twendz uses a keyword-based approach to score tweets. Meaningful words in each tweet are compared against a ‘dictionary’ of thousands of words that are associated with positive or negative sentiment; each word receives a score that, when combined with the other scored words, allows twendz to make an educated guess at the overall tone of a tweet. After twendz scores a handful of tweets matching certain criteria, it extracts key terms, assigns a tone rating to each of those, and assembles them in a word cloud.’
Sounds good. My only concern is if twendz can figure out the context in which a particular word has been used. For example, ‘spam = negative’ might be questionable when I received a reply about somebody else like ‘Mr. Toby spams’. I mean I’m not the one talked about negatively here.
This aside, the tool looks promising (it’s still in beta) and something one can used to quickly see how people are talking about a brand or topic on Twitter. Check up your client on it.

Palin Ningthoujam, Digital Strategist @ 




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