We are experiencing a social web explosion. Social networks enable users to share their views on news, persons, brands, and products, making them the vastest potential source for opinion-mining, sentiment analysis, and trends prediction. Collective intelligence adds an increasingly important social layer on business intelligence and expert informed decisions. Within this framework, ATC is developing TruthNest, an analytics tool to aid professionals and the public in making sense of what is happening in the Social World.
Experience innovation in Journalism
Social Media seem to have replaced “first hand sources”, providing new channels for direct access to information. Yet, all the sides have their say in this big bang of gossiping: truth and lies, positive and negative, genuine and fake. The truth is out there but can we discover it?
So, apart from providing a globally accessible real-time interface with primary sources of information, social media also radically change mainstream content distribution and consumption. Established news brands continue playing an important role on that matter; however people tend to read all the more news shared by their friends or other social network relationships as objectivity of journalists, institutions, financial and other corporate entities is increasingly questioned.
TruthNest aims to provide journalists and the public a tool to help filter reality from noise. For this purpose we bring together all possible automatic controls and metrics into a transparent environment to help users:
- Locate possible credible sources of information efficiently in the critical interval between the first minutes after an event occurs and before the social media channels are flooded by noise.
- Verify authenticity of information posted during turmoil situations where information flow is blocked between controlled media and social media polarization and even propaganda.
- At the same time we continue to value and incorporate human input as one of the most important means of identifying what is true and what is not.
Experience innovation in Finance and Marketing
Tracking collective sentiment about certain brands and products can be a valuable enhancement for informed financial and marketing decisions. Marketers can gain direct insight into the sentiments caused by their campaigns and the advertised products. Stockbrokers can gain intuition on the collective sentiment about certain companies and therefore the corresponding stocks (see for example Twitter mood predicts the stock market).
Social media are also increasingly being used as campaign channels for marketers that look for cheaper alternatives. “Internet memes” and “guerilla marketing” techniques are employed to reach consumers with often impressive efficiency. Accurate social media analytics provides with impact insight and helps reaching the desired audiences more efficiently.
In the financial domain, a growing body of evidence shows that financial institutions of all kinds become gradually less trusted due to their perceived role in the ongoing financial crisis. According to the Reuters Institute, Digital News Report (2012) the only domain that has not seen a decrease in trust is price comparison sites. TruthNest can add a social analysis dimension on websites providing a comparison of financial products and services providing expert opinion for investment purposes.
