BBC Radio Interview on Twitter investment fund

My thanks to the team at BBC World Service who invited me for an interview on the ‘World Today’ current affairs radio show with Tom Hagler.  This was for a story about Derwent Capital Markets, which has launched a $40million fund that will invest based on sentiment measured on Twitter.

Paul Hawtin from Derwent Capital and I both pre-recorded interviews which were broadcast around 3am on Friday morning, May 20th, along with commentary from Tom Hagler.

I think this is a fascinating project and am very curious to track it’s success.  It’s especially interesting as sentiment is notoriously difficult to measure and really requires a skilled analytics specialist to sense check and audit the measurement.  It is a generally accepted rule of thumb that the best automated sentiment engines achieve 60-70% accuracy with identifying sentiment – there are only 140 characters per tweet which isn’t a lot to go on!

At Waggener Edstrom, we work with a number of clients tracking their social media presence and performance.  It is becoming clear to businesses that Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. are not trivialities and can have a serious commercial impact, to the point that if you are not online and in social media it starts to raise questions for customers.  Even our clients that offer B2B services are finding real commercial benefits from a well thought out and implemented digital strategy.

So it’s not surprising that the financial sector is also looking at the benefits of Twitter, in this case as a predictive market indicator, somewhat similar to the ‘Hollywood Stock Exchange’.