GalaxyAdvisors tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010-03-10:/1 2012-02-02T02:06:01Z Don't Be a Star, Be a Galaxy Movable Type 4.34-en SWSX Session "Coolhunting and Coolfarming with Social Media tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2012://1.203 2012-02-02T02:03:31Z 2012-02-02T02:06:01Z On Saturday, March 10 2012, at the InterContinental Stephen F Austin, do not miss "Coolhunting and Coolfarming with Social Media". Peter Gloor of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and supporting panel will answer questions like: Is 'cool farming' the... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com Coolhunting and Coolfarming with Social Media". Peter Gloor of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and supporting panel will answer questions like: Is 'cool farming' the cold fusion of marketing and advertisements? What factors and metrics determine viral-ness or cool-ness? ]]> Video of Peter's keynote at the Austrian Innovation Forum tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.202 2011-11-14T15:06:34Z 2011-11-14T15:10:46Z Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com video (in German) of Peter's keynote about the "wisdom of swarms, and the madness of many" at the Austrian Innovation Forum in Vienna, Oct 13, 2011 ]]> US Intelligence community interested in galaxyadvisors work tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.201 2011-10-29T21:09:12Z 2011-10-29T21:12:42Z In September Miller-McCune journalist Emily Badger interviewed Peter Gloor about his work finding the people behind trends -- information producers, not the information itself -- before trends take off.Read article... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com
]]> Nature News quotes prediction capabilities tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.200 2011-10-29T21:02:06Z 2011-10-29T21:07:43Z Recently Nature News interviewed galaxyadvisors Chief Creative Officer Peter Gloor about our prediction work...building models that can predict consumerbehaviour, such as ticket sales for Hollywood films, using a range of onlinesources including social media.Read Nature articleThe same work has also... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com behaviour, such as ticket sales for Hollywood films, using a range of online
sources including social media.


The same work has also been picked up by Daily Mail
]]> Gartner forecast for social media - galaxyadvisors key player tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.199 2011-10-29T20:52:08Z 2011-10-29T20:59:29Z Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com
]]> Creative Swarms - Keynote at Austrian Innovation Forum, Oct 13, 2011, Vienna tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.197 2011-07-01T16:53:24Z 2011-08-29T13:09:23Z You are invited to the Austrian Innovation Forum in Vienna, Oct 13. Senseable cities and creative swarms are at the center. More...... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com More...]]> Swarm Intelligence reduces complexity tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.196 2011-05-01T01:53:22Z 2011-05-01T01:55:48Z This article in Swiss Magazine Alpha (in German) describes how social network analysis helps to reduce complexity in the organization by showing the hidden connections, influencers, and trendsetters. more....... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com more....]]> SIB Seminar - Social Network Analysis for entrepreneurial success, July 6/7 2011 Zurich tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2011://1.195 2011-05-01T01:48:24Z 2011-08-29T13:13:57Z Jointly with SIB, galaxyadvisors offers a two-day seminar on "Social Network Analysis Leveraging Swarmcreativity for the enterprise". It will be at SIB Oct 17/18, 2011 in Zurich.... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com SIB, galaxyadvisors offers a two-day seminar on "Social Network Analysis Leveraging Swarmcreativity for the enterprise". It will be at SIB Oct 17/18, 2011 in Zurich. ]]> Coolhunting Webinar December 9th, 2010 tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.193 2010-11-10T14:54:54Z 2011-07-01T16:53:12Z Watch a replay of a Webinar on "Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarmcreativity" on eduhub.ch. Here is the description of the webinar.... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com description of the webinar.]]> Predicting the 2010 Oscars on Swiss TV tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.191 2010-09-20T00:12:39Z 2010-09-20T00:15:45Z View the archive video of our prediction of the 2010 Academy Awards produced by Swiss National TV. It includes a very nice discussion of how Coolhunting works (in Swiss German).... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com video of our prediction of the 2010 Academy Awards produced by Swiss National TV. It includes a very nice discussion of how Coolhunting works (in Swiss German).]]> Predicting the World Cup 2010 Winner tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.190 2010-09-20T00:06:37Z 2010-09-20T00:09:52Z Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com Recently I was giving a presentation about Coolhunting through Swarm Creativity at the CRM Forum in Zurich. As there was the Soccer World Championship at that time in South Africa, at the end, the moderator Susanne Wille asked me to make my predictions about which team would win the World Cup. Unfortunately, reading the collective mind on the Web does not predict the outcome of 22 soccer players fighting each other particularly well, not to speak about inexplicable decisions of the referee. I therefore refused to make a prediction. Nevertheless, of course we have our prediction system running on our new CoolTrend 2.0 for the last few weeks, because the wisdom of the crowd is still better than chance, although not on the level of accuracy we can reach when predicting political elections or movie box office returns.
So here are our trend curves about which team would win the World Cup, as of June 24, 2010, first the trends on the Web, then on the Blogs


The first thing to note are the huge oscillations among the leaders. Even Italy, out by now, has been traded once (around May 18) as a leader. At the time of the coolhunt (June 23rd), the crowd both on the Web and Blogs thinks that Argentina and Brazil have the best chances to be the 2010 Soccer World Champion. Well, as we know by now, Spain won the championship.]]> Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter "I hope it is not as bad as I fear" tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.189 2010-09-20T00:03:16Z 2010-09-20T00:04:50Z Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz, predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office. Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley's Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title.

The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volume of all tweets, as the total volume in 2009 was about 2,5 million tweets per day. We tried to measure collective hope and fear on each day by applying the simple metric of counting all tweets containing the words "hope" - there were 54 to 467 tweets per day, and "fear" or "worry" - there were 9 to 100 tweets per day. This tells us that people prefer optimistic words (hope) to pessimist words (fear or worry).


As external benchmark of investor fear we used the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index VIX, which is strongly negatively correlated with Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ, which is not surprising, as the spread of stock options on a given day is used to calculate VIX. Initially we expected the number of tweets with hope to negatively correlate with VIX, and the number of tweets with fear or worry to correlate positively with VIX. Surprisingly, we found positive weak but insignificant correlation for both "hope" (0.135) and "fear" or "worry" (0.172) with VIX, and negative significant correlation with both "fear" and "worry" and "hope" with Dow NASDAQ and S&P500 (This means that people start using more emotional words such as hope, fear, worry in times of economic uncertainty. We therefore created a simple twitter-volatility index combining mentions of hope, fear and worry, normalizing it with the total amount of tweets per day as a baseline. This index displays strong significant negative correlations to Dow, NASDAQ and S&P500, and strong significant positive correlation to VIX (see table below).


The picture below visualized the negative correlation between Dow (blue) and "hope, fear, and worry" (green) in the period March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009.


To put this in simple words, when the emotions on twitter fly high, that is when people express a lot of hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes down the next day. When people have less hope, fear, and worry, the Dow goes up. It therefore seems that just checking on twitter for emotional outbursts of any kind gives a predictor of how the stock market will be doing the next day.

Just to be clear, what we have presented here are very early preliminary results, and much more work is needed to scientifically verify it. ]]> Emotions Draw Close Friends: Analyzing the Social Network Structure of Facebook Fan Pages tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.188 2010-09-20T00:01:55Z 2010-09-20T00:02:34Z Recently we were wondering if the social network structure of fans of a brand, a star, or a cause tells us how passionate the fans are. To be more precise, we were looking at the network structure of the friendship... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com Recently we were wondering if the social network structure of fans of a brand, a star, or a cause tells us how passionate the fans are. To be more precise, we were looking at the network structure of the friendship network of Facebook fan pages. This means that we collected - as far a publicly accessible - the friendship network of the people who clicked on the "like" button on a fan page.
For a start, look at the fan page of our own COINs2010 conference (by the way, the conference will be soon in Savannah Oct 7 to 9, at SCAD, we hope to see many of you there ☺ ).

The dark dots in the network are the fans of COINs2010, the green dots are their friends. This means that for this initial analysis we looked at how many and how well-connected friends a fan of COINs2010 has. We ignored direct links between the fans, but focused on their external friendship network.

In this first attempt we looked at a total of 15 fan groups in 5 categories, see the table below:

We (admittedly subjectively) ranked the emotionality from 1 (product brands) to 5 (medical causes). We found positive correlation of 0.33 (although non-significant) between the network density and emotionality. This means, the more connected the friends of a cause or brand are, the more emotional they are about their cause. Even more interestingly, we found significant negative correlation between the clustering coefficient of -0.57. This means that the more the friends of fans are clustered in subgroups, the less emotional they are.

The conclusions would be that the causes with the most emotional supporters have a dense, but evenly spread out network, with few clearly separated subgroups.

Based on this admittedly very preliminary analysis, what are actions you can take to further you cause? The answer is simple: Help to weave the network of your supporters.
1. broker connections between supporters
2. fight fragmentation of supporters by connecting subgroups
In short - help build one large happy familiy! ]]> Swiss Forum for Educational Media tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.187 2010-09-19T23:47:48Z 2010-11-10T15:07:07Z Chief Creative Officer Peter Gloor delivered a keynote at the Swiss Forum for Educational Media in Basel, Oct 28,2010 about "Using Collective Intelligence to Coolhunt for educational trends".... Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com Swiss Forum for Educational Media in Basel, Oct 28,2010 about "Using Collective Intelligence to Coolhunt for educational trends".]]> Keynote: Coolhunting & Coolfarming Feb 2, Munich tag:galaxyadvisors.com,2010://1.186 2010-09-19T23:42:48Z 2010-09-19T23:47:35Z Peter A. Gloor http://www.galaxyadvisors.com German CRM Forum February 1&2 in Munich, Germany. ]]>