Geek Soap Box

With over 500 tweets collected and logged into an Excel spreadsheet related to the Cadillac Escalade Hybrid, certain key phrases and reactions become readily apparent.  One simple way to organize and display this data is via a “word cloud” — a randomized visual display of the most-repeated words in any given accumulation of text, with size representing relative frequency.  To create this cloud, I removed from the tweets any references to other users and hypertext links and then inserted the text as one large block into the cloud builder on Wordle.net.

Here’s how it looks:

A visual display of repeated consumer sentiments helps to further make repeated comments literally jump off the screen.

• The word “oxymoron” in relation to the product’s green branding and limited environmental benefit proves that this concept was not lost on the consumer base.
• “Just” and “gets” often appears in tandem with “MPG” as most-repeated turns of phrase, in relation to the vehicle’s fuel economy.
• Other negative repeated words: “trust-fund,” “pissed-off” and “Paris” (as in heiress Paris Hilton).

Not all reactions were negative, of course.  Many textbook positive indicators of consumer needs and wants also appear often in the collection of user comments: “like,” “love,” “need” and “want” also appear scattered throughout. In addition, the word “saw” can be interpreted to indicate that many consumers are so profoundly — either positively or negatively — moved by the product when seeing it on the street that they felt compelled to comment on it via their preferred social network.  Regardless of sentiment, it’s definitely clear that the Escalade Hybrid invokes serious and frequent “buzz” among the appropriate target demographics, and any buzz is better than none at all.