McCombs researchers Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston and Elizabeth Winkler decided to test Twitter's business relevancy by connecting it to revenue for one of the world’s most buzz-hungry products: the summer blockbuster.

Using a custom-built tracking program and 20 servers to sift through tweets from millions of people, they collected more than 100,000 tweets about three movies that opened on the same day: “The Hangover,” “Land of the Lost” and “My Life in Ruins.”

Winkler and Whinston categorized each tweet as being positive, negative or neutral towards the film it mentioned. “For the first two movies [“Land of the Lost” and “My Life in Ruins,”] sales peaked on the opening weekend and sharply diminished after that, by around 50 percent each week,” they wrote in an article in the Sloan Management Review.

“The number of tweets was consistent with the downward sales trend, indicating that the movies didn’t make a great impact. In the case of ‘The Hangover,’ however, both sales and tweets remained quite steady over time. People were tweeting about their plans to see the movie as well as their reaction coming out of the movie, which created buzz and encouraged others to see the movie as well.”

“The Hangover” also garnered far more positive tweets than either of the other movies.

To capitalize on Twitter’s usefulness, Whinston and Winkler recommend participating in the Twitter ecosystem: listen to customers, identify influencers and monitor shifts in opinion.

Whinston is a professor of Information, Risk and Operations Management and Rui is a graduate student in the department. Winkler is a research associate at McCombs and all three are members of the school's Center For Research in Electronic Commerce.