Microsoft is beating Google, at least in the battle for hearts and minds on Twitter

Posted on July 14th, 2009 by mike

Microsoft. The Borg, right?

Not anymore, at least according to Vox Twitter on a host of recent issues.

It started with Bing, which a slim majority of Twitter-ers between June 29 and July 13 – but a majority nonetheless – generally liked:

Bing Opinion Monitor Chart

Bing Opinion Monitor Chart

Next came Google’s Chrome OS announcement, which as discussed in a prior post, yielded an almost audible “meh” from vox Twitter. 19% of topical tweets between June 29 and July 13 were generally unimpressed, and the largest single theme of the conversation conveyed the sense that Chrome was no threat to the OS powers that be, foremost among which is Microsoft:

Chrome OS Opinion Monitor

Chrome OS Opinion Monitor

Yesterday’s response to Office 2010 is the clincher. A combined 71% of twitter traffic was positive for Microsoft. The nature of that positive response is interesting… 14% cited the free and online character of the offering, and 16% Microsoft’s innovation in the cloud. 1 in 5 expressed a variant of excitement and/or love for it, and 21% cited it, specifically, as a threat to Google:

office2010

If Twitter is, as some feel, a leading indicator of the fickle flows of sentiment among the influential digerati, the last few weeks may have witnessed a sea change with far reaching implications… both in Redmond, and in Mountain View.

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Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere // Comments

  • drewv
    Microsoft has been running contests on Twitter to generate tweets about themselves. Does this skew your analysis or do you factor them out ?
  • Well there's a first philosophical question about whether we should. In the end, regardless of reason, those people decided to chime in to the conversation.

    Second, our technology can discern the nature of the post, as opposed to just the fact that a a keyword was used in a tweet. Again, unless the contest indicated the user had to BOTH use a keyword and say something positive, the system would not be fooled.

    Finally... it's worth pointing out that our enabling technology is far less susceptible to this kind of gaming than other approaches. Once the algorithm "learns" the numerical pattern that defines each theme in the conversation, it checks every single items to classify it in one or the other. That's in contrast to every other system we know of, which infers the breakdown of the "forest" from a limited sample of the "trees" which is drawn at random and assumed to be representative.
  • Interesting. But you missed out on all the hype around GoogleWAVE and MS Project NATAL. Those were massive trending topics on Twitter - particularly WAVE.
  • Fair point, Dennis. Though I don't think Wave is a poke at Outlook the way Bing, Chrome and Office are pokes at their respective adversaries.
  • Then take another look, because that's not the direction they're poking. Wave is being angled as the "unified field theory" that will bring together Instant Messaging, e-mail, document sharing, microblogging, and a few flavours of Social Media. It's designed to be (and I suspect it will be) a game-changer, so a head-to-head comparison would be difficult.
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