A group of researchers from the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Sciences and Harvard Medical School recently unveiled the results of a study they undertook to map out how happy or sad Americans were at different times of the day and week. They accomplished this by analyzing the sentiment in over 300 million messages sent through Twitter from 2006 to 2009. The results were captivating to say the least.

Some of the results confirmed intuitive expectations (people are happier at the edges of the workday in the early morning and late evening) while some were not so obvious (the unhappiest moments of the week occur Thursday evenings).

However, one of the best parts of the results overall were how they were partly delivered: through color coded cartograms or mood maps of the United States. Below is a time-lapsed video of the mood map over a 24 period (cycled twice). The size and the color of the states on the map fluctuate with Twitter traffic volume and mood – the heavier the message traffic, the larger the state proportionally and the mood shifts from red (unhappy) to green (happy) accordingly.

If this study is a testament to anything it’s the increasing significance of Twitter as a platform to tap not only real-time information from an immense user base but also sentiment. And for brands, this gets even more interesting when Twitter analysis goes a few layers deeper to match sentiment with the brands themselves…as well as their competitors.

Taking the real-time pulse of brand health, as measured by consumer sentiment, is one of the holy grails of marketing research. That is the very reason why more social media tracking technologies, metrics and dashboards have cropped up over the past couple years than you can shake a stick at. It goes without saying that the one or handful of companies who really crack the potential of Twitter and other platforms to measure not just moods but moods specific to marketers’ brands will be, not unlike the states in this study’s cartograms, happy and green for years to come.