Analyzing behavior patterns, knowing exactly what individuals are thinking or doing online, and how it extends to their daily lives, provides for an accurate assessment of “peeking” through the social looking glass and the collective minds of society, based on the public’s terms. Social Media has now made the transfer towards liquid information ubiquitous, but to many, it’s also devoid of any monetary value whatsoever.
What may be scarce now and thus valuable in the future is what’s on the user’s radar, which may explain the intense efforts which are placed to obtain information through concerted focused advertising, along with short relevant videos within news portals, or even the disheartening of unwanted spam.
Understanding how people will directly allocate their attention, while steering them towards specific content, determining what they do behind closed doors, has presented tremendous value. Social media can provide this, the harnessing of enormous as well as highly variable flow of concise information, which propagates through enormous user networks, making it possible to be able to predict specific outcomes.
Predicting Future Success From Peer-to-Peer User Information
Current research groups have recently shown that Twitter messages can be used to accurately predict approximate revenues and box-office success for newly released movies which are about to open in theaters. This without costly advertising or promotion by the film company.
The basic intuition of this is quite simple. The higher the rate at which the general population, the actual underground buzz, who’s actually discussing a forthcoming movie that’s opening, the more likely that it’s going to have a larger audience on its opening night.
Studying the exact feelings and the temperature regarding a movie which appears on Twitter, or any other social network also propagates through the opening weekend, increasing its accuracy of future forecasts as time goes on.
There are other advantages of gauging the pulse of unbiased social networking attitudes as well, among them is that such knowledge may be used to swiftly as well as instantly shift advertising budgets from one product to a another in midstream, which may be trending better on social chatter.
Free Unfiltered User Information
This source of free and instant analysis offers a wide range of potential uses. This technique although focused on movies, can range to new Television Shows as well to verify consumer predictions. It also can be cross applied towards other products and services, tangible or not, basing decisions on the direct social media responses.
This engagement can include anything from new product releases, academic discussions of new technology, open public “media” debates regarding future trends, etc.
The masses will now predict the future for you, without your influence. However that may be interesting, it’s just one potential benefit of being able to know how the public’s attention is distributed within social media. Large masses of people who constitutes a direct collective of focused intelligence, can also be harnessed for a myriad of other purposes.
A Bonanza For Enterprises
Think of what enterprises can potentially do if social media computing can help in deciding who or how to tap into this “peer to peer” collective intelligence, and then these businesses can decide to adopt it as an integral part of their arsenal and promotion.
It can offer research and development departments of companies a way of accurately narrowing down and pinpointing their choice to just a few options, based strictly on public demand. These enterprises along with the individuals can just use what’s important or popular with their consumers and eliminate or place everything else on the back burner.
Organizations ranging anywhere from government body’s to charities are able to gain new insights without conducting costly surveys, or spending countless money and resources collecting opinions and intelligence which enables them to evaluate different opinions, while simultaneously learning and tracking new emerging trends.
For businesses, social media tracking allows them to understand how their products are ranking, along with knowing what the test results are, and then they can proceed on how best they can exploit them.
This will grow in importance as better, more accurate quantities of exact and accurate data are created via social media on a daily basis. But for anyone to be able to accurately exploit this information and wisdom, requires efficient ways to extract, filter out and then rank importance and insights from the raw social data.
So exact methods of extraction needs to be developed which results in the power of being able to analyzing collective intelligence that’s presented by social media processes.
Future tools and applications will also appear which can connect individuals with the direct workings of the collective social mind, while creating yet another new source of information which can determine our choices as well as ideas regarding what to do as well as how we should be acting.