Recognizing that teeing-up perception of the new OS is critical to its initial success, Microsoft itself decided to stoke the fires on Twitter as a part of its marketing effort.  There was the #winwin7 campaign and other attempts by Microsoft as part of its multi-faceted campaign. @rupalparekh over at AdvertisingAge (@adage) covered the moves pretty thoroughly.  So we’ve been tracking sentiment against Windows 7 for several months now.  After all we’re interested in what people are really thinking (and saying on Twitter).

So it’s with a little surprise (and reaffirmation of the importance of what we’re doing here at review’d) to see what we Microsoft has up as its home page today for launch.  Check it out:

Microsoft's home page on Oct. 22, 2009

Cheers to Microsoft for bringing users statements to the forefront!  But are they?  A couple of searches on featured tweets yielded no results in Twitter’s own search engine.  That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist (tweets are purged out of search over time unless you indicate the specific date range).  Still, if Microsoft is featuring “real-time” reviews for marketing efforts, the tweets better be fresh.  Jury is still out on whether or not this one is a little too stale:

Windows 7 tweet citation fail

Seriously though, what are people really saying about Windows 7?  Dare we believe the editors behind this revolving feed of rainbows, unicorns and 100% positive reviews? Here’s the latest from review’d:

Oct. 21-22, 2009

The numbers on the above graph are as follows: 226 tweets total (131 positive and 95 negative for a 58% positive hurrah on launch day so far). I’d say reviews are a little more skeptical than Microsoft would lead you to believe.  Still, people can be pretty harsh out there on the interwebs, shrouded in anonymity and separated by screens and input devices.  Here are some verbatims we collected from the two camps.

First on the positive side:

Positive tweets as tracked by review'd

Thanks to @mattymax, @Ducky11, and @troymccabe for the above tweets.

And on the other side of the fence:

Negative tweets as tracked by review'd

Credit to @tweeetosaurus, @djDeficit, and @jimtac for their words of wisdom.

Fact of the matter is that an aggregate of these messages helps to create an aura about a product.  It’s intensified by the consumption quantity (followers receiving) and authority level of the originator – something that Microsoft has reduced down to “Twitter User” in its questionable citations.

In this little journey through Microsoft’s marketing today, we also found this fun little feed to help visitors understand “What people are saying about Windows 7.”  It pulls in reviews and discussions from all the fun sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and an RSS blog feed.  To join the conversation, you tag your message or content with #win7, #windows and the like.  So we sat and watched the stream for a good bit of time waiting for anything negative to come through…zilch.

Microsoft, if you want to play fair in social media, censoring (if that indeed is what you’re doing) is off-limits.  For the rest of us, the best piece of advice today might be to just take a peek at the same hash tags within Twitter’s search or set up a column in TweetDeck to get the unfiltered truth.

Daily review'd score

So what’s this review’d score?  It’s one of the most important metrics that review’d makes available.  It’s consistent system-wide (in terms of how it’s calculated) and represents a sense of how opinions are faring for the entity you’re tracking.  It’s based on a 0-100 scale (0 = people are completely upset to 100 = ecstatically overjoyed).

We typically present it as two numbers on an org’s profile page.  One is your daily score, so that’s the relationship between positive and negative tweets tracked today.  The other is a reputation score, which fluctuates less and is based off of the previous seven days worth of data.  The tide can turn swiftly in Twitterverse and so we’ve chosen this period based on our experience of witnessing events unfold for orgs such as Whole Foods or people like Kanye West.

What’s interesting about the above comparison (showing just the daily score over time) is that Red Sox support actually rose as they lost.  Angels, on the other hand, declined by about 10 points.  You’ll also note that the Sox score dropped to 0 at one point.  This is because there were no positive tweets tracked that day – the day the Sox first faced-off against the Angels and lost.

You’ll be hearing us mention the review’d score often moving forward, but let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks to all of you who signed up for the Feedburner feed of this blog.  We appreciate it.  Also, welcome to all the new @reviewd followers on Twitter!

What’s review’d?
review’d is this a brand new sentiment analytics service that is in beta right now.  It scours Twitter based on keywords and returns only the most important tweets that also express either positive or negative opinions with the statement.  The tweets are scored and then a assigned a review’d Score that is tracked over time.  With it, you can see and understand what’s working and what isn’t.  Adjust your social media and online marketing efforts and observe and quantify your results.

When can I start using it?
Soon.  We’re tracking a number of companies already and will be sharing some of our findings with you right here.  So sign up for the Feedburner feed and keep check back with us so that you can be some of the first to sign up.

What’s unique about what you do?
review’d is one of the first sentiment analytic services out there for short online communications.  We’ve been testing and refining the algorithm for a couple of months now and we’re pleased with where it’s headed. With review’d, you’ll get quality custom reports and a baseline score to help you keep track of how you’re fairing on Twitter. 

Yes, we acknowledge that there are some others out there doing similar things. review’d was built by people who needed its offering and did so without any start-up funding. Call it “by the people for the people” if you must…at the end of the day, you’ll get a whole lot more value out of review’d.

We’ll be constantly improving
review’d needs to be just as much you as it is us. We need your feedback in order to improve. So please know that we’re not so proud to think that we can’t do better. We’ll be constantly making adjustments to the system to improve accuracy and usability while still maintaining a solid baseline for you to track your social media efforts over time.

How do we send in our feedback?
There are multiple ways to make yourself heard. Share your comments here, follow us on Twitter: @reviewd or contact either of us directly at @docjohng (john [at] reviewd [dot] com) or @ericfleming (eric[at] reviewd [dot] com).

Who are you guys again?
John and I have been around the Internet for quite some time.  In John’s case, he’s worked to build the Web’s largest and oldest mental health and psychology Web site over at www.PsychCentral.com.  It’s seriously helpful stuff and after 14 years of publishing more content that you click on, it was time to apply some of what he’s been up to (from a technical and biz dev perspective) to help get this up off the ground.

In my case, I’ve been living and breathing the Web for more than 10 years with a media, PR, and marketing eye.  Most of this time, it’s been marketing and online community development through my experiences at a high profile start-up company. There, myself and a great team have worked to create social media sites, tools, and content while also developing and deploying some pretty cool b2c and b2b lead gen systems. Tack on loads of sweet branding and creative asset development and that gets us to where we are today.

I’m sure we’ll have more to say about ourselves and why we’re on to sentiment analytics.  For now, we’re pleased to flip the proverbial lever and welcome you to review’d.

What’s coming next?
We want to show you our stuff. Here’s a preview of a couple of topics we’ll be taking a look at over the next couple of weeks:

• An overview from around the Web with titans in focus
• MLB heads into the postseason
• NFL in full swing

~Eric