Thursday, February 14, 2013

State of the Union, Twitter and Social Workplace Innovation



“…what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one” was one of the most Tweeted about statements in the recent Presidential State of the Union Address. That probably does not surprise you. But how did viewers respond to the rest of the message? Climate control got a lot of tweets, so did helping to fight poverty, but surprisingly, the very emotional appeal around gun control did not get much twitter reaction.

This information comes from The Social Reaction Group which monitored the volume of twitter traffic for every line the President spoke and created an Infographic to display the results. If people tweeted about something just a little bit, the words were small in print, if they tweeted a lot about it the words were much bigger. If the tweets were by a man they were in blue, if they were by a woman they were in pink. (cute). Check out the link – the data is fascinating and the graphics are fun: Social Reaction State Of The Union.

Tracking ideas, trends, concepts, proposals, new products, you name it, is something that is getting more and more sophisticated. This is big data in action. It is not really very useful to know what one person might say about a topic, but it is extremely valuable when you can track how millions of people respond to an idea. That is what Social Reaction Group and InferLink are all about.

The founder of InferLink and a member of the Social Reaction Group is Dr Steven Minton. He’s also my partner. Dr Minton and I are exploring the use of advanced AI (artificial intelligence) search techniques to find data relevant to HR professionals. We believe this kind of data can help with recruiting, employment screening, on-boarding, employee development and even more.

People put a lot of effort into their social and professional networks and helping them harvest that effort to improve their work-life is what we believe in.

We haven’t had time to name our company yet, but stay tuned; there will be interesting new products to come.

In the meantime – keep tweeting away.

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