Sponsored Video: Social Intelligence

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Here's an interesting video from PA Consulting about their 'social intelligence' service.

What actually is 'social intelligence'?

Let's get one thing straight. Social media has a bad image with some senior managers in companies mainly because they don't understand it. Their social awareness is limited. They think that sharing snippets of information on Twitter or LinkedIn is about as useful as graffiti on a lavatory wall written by someone with too much time on their hands. They believe it has no place in a serious business doing serious work. Why spend time sending out 'tweets' when you can be signing a deal or inventing a new product? Social media is just a fluffy load of nonsense, according to some people.

That point of view about social media could be true to a degree.

Predicting Stock Market Movements

But, when you hear that someone in the USA has predicted stock market movements  a few days ahead correctly using Twitter data, then you should start to take things a little more seriously when it comes to social media. These academics correctly predicted stock markets moves 6 days ahead by studying 2.9 million tweets and, when there's money involved, people sit up and take notice. The people carrying out the Twitter data analysis looked at the calmness level within the tweets and compared that to the movements in the Down Jones Industrial Average and found that there was a correlation. That's quite a finding and, perhaps, a good example of 'social intelligence' in action.

'Social intelligence' is not just a fad either. It's getting some serious investment in it, both financially and academically.

At Sheffield University in the UK, there is a team of academics that has developed some very sophisticated open source software which is designed for text processing. So, what? Well, the software, known as 'Gate', is designed for solving "text processing problems" on a large scale. For example, the software is used for listening to customers by commercial companies that want to know what their customers think about their products and, by doing so, develop their social awareness. They mine through information on Twitter, blogs and other information sources such as emails and text messages to understand sentiments amongst their customers which will help them to understand opinions and adapt their products and services more precisely to their customers wishes.

Those businesses using the text processing software are gaining social awareness which is providing them with more than just random sentiments. Its providing them tangible results upon which they can act to be more competitive.

Are you starting to get the picture now about how increasing your social awareness can increase your social intelligence?

Social Awareness is nothing new

But, the reality with social media is that it's nothing new. The 'Gate' software has been around since the 1990s mining text and sentiments. Even before that, in Word War 2 the government warned people against unguarded gossip or whispers for fear of giving away military intelligence through an unwitting mention that your husband was fighting in a certain Royal Navy ship in a specific part of the world. Social awareness is something we have always been familiar with in our lives.

It just now that we have the internet and the tools to let people know our thoughts, opinions and feelings online this information can be around the world in seconds and it can be captured and analysed in ways which were just not possible ten years or more ago.

The PA Consulting video highlights how social media really can be used to gather information about your competitors in a serious way to help grow your business, protect your business and keep ahead of changes in the market.

Social media is not just for kids. It's a serious business tool these days and senior individuals need to understand its importance. Watch the video to see how they express the importance of social intelligence is today.


Although this post is sponsored by PA Consulting Group, I would not put it onto my blog if I didn't like it.