Using Twitter Search Results for #babies

Our newest project Budding Baby, includes a tab with Twitter comments from the public that contains this hashtag, #babies. Not surprisingly, when you perform a generic Twitter search about babies almost anything could come back and does.  For instance, I just performed a search using the following:

[code]http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23babies[/code]

Here is one of the many results:

"U will *neva knw until *dere* is a tragedy..eii so old people also cry *lyk* #babies"

Now that's not quite what we were going for, and that tweet really isn't very positive either.  So what can we do?

Twitter to the rescue...the Search API allows you to append an extra parameter to your query to filter out negative tweets. Wonderful!  So if I run the query again, this time using the "smiley face" parameter, I get much happier tweets.

Here is the new search query:

[code]http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23babies%20:)[/code]

Much happier results:

"baby love. :) #babies #cute #love #life #motherhood http://t.co/mnhrqmlL"

Have you worked with the Twitter Search API?  Leave comments below.

Mobile Game Marketing: The Power of Word-of-Mouth

When marketing your mobile game don't underestimate the power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.  Well, what is Word-of-Mouth Marketing?  It has been described this way by the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association:

"The act of consumers providing information to other consumers...It is the art and science of building active, mutually beneficial consumer-to-consumer and consumer-to-marketer communications."

What can that mean for you and your business?  Well, basically you need to make a great product and provide tools to make it easier for your customers to share how wonderful your game/application is with others.  You may think that this form of marketing is free, but that is not necessarily the case.  You need to provide infrastructure that makes this type of consumer-to-consumer marketing successful and it does require lots of time to keep up with the different front-facing tools that you choose to implement.

In marketing our first game, Word Crank, we have used the following tools to facilitate the Word-of-Mouth process.

Tools

• Facebook Fan Page


• Twitter Account


• Blog with sharing abilities


• YouTube Channel


• Reddit Account


• OpenFeint integration in the game


• Email

Making use of these various tools takes time, as you have to constantly make posts and send updates.  But more importantly you allow your customers the opportunity to provide feedback and then easily share the information that they have received with others.  So far we are happy with this area of our Marketing endeavors.  However, it's challenging to say for sure quantitatively what the impact has been up to this point.