We’ve now started to monitor Twitter posts to gain information about how mobile broadband users feel about the service that they receive.
We thought about adding user reviews to the MobileBroadbandSupermarket.co.uk website to help our visitors make confident decisions, and then realised that people are already talking about their experiences with the mobile broadband networks, via the Twitter micro-blogging service. So, we’re collecting all Tweets about mobile broadband from 12 different cities, and logging each one that is either positive or negative about a particular provider.
We’re taking tweets from a 25 mile radius around the following 12 UK cities:
London, Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Newcastle/Sunderland, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Sheffield.
The Rules
We want to ensure that we get an accurate picture of the general mood of Twitter users when it comes to their own experiences with their mobile broadband services, so we’ve drawn up a set of rules to help us decide whether a Tweet is positive, negative, or not relevant:
A relevant Tweet must:
~ Reference either a personal experience, or first-hand word-of-mouth comment about a mobile broadband service.
For example, “My Vodafone mobile broadband is great!” and “My friend John has a really fast connection with his T-Mobile dongle,” are both relevant, positive comments. “I’ve heard that 3 are really good,” and “Orange have won an award for their mobile broadband” wouldn’t count, as they don’t refer to personal experiences.
~ Be explicit about the network/ provider being referred to, mentioning them by name.
Where’s The Data?
Although we’ve been collecting data for a couple of weeks already, we won’t publish statistics until we have enough to draw some meaningful conclusions, so keep your eyes peeled, as we’ll release them soon.
Once we’ve released the first batch of statistics, we’ll have daily updated stats here on the site, where users can easily find out how each network is doing. We’ll also publish a quarterly report with findings based on deeper analysis of the data.
Feel free to leave questions, suggestions or comments below – we’re interested to hear what you think about this.
Love this idea! It’s about time that somebody came up with a really practical use of Twitter! Most of the stuff I’ve seen on there is along the lines of ‘I’m just having a coffee’. I wish this service had been up and running when I made my first Dongle purchase!
Dave
[...] first noticed irritated Tweets through our Twitter monitoring system a couple of weeks ago, with Twitter users complaining that their mobile broadband services were out [...]