Social Topic Conversations: What You Want, When You Want It, How You Want It

SMA is an analytics company with unique IP for filtering and quantification of social media.   SMA to date has been primarily focused on the capital markets given our extensive knowledge of this industry.   On deck for us is the natural expansion of our capabilities to a “Topic Model” format.  Right now, we use our proprietary technology to filter and quantify the conversations around stocks, commodities and foreign exchange.  But the world cares about much more and we can help.

Early on we recognized the trans-formative value of Twitter as the next frontier for breaking and disseminating news.  Its high noise to signal ratio represented an opportunity for us to apply our knowledge to generate value.   We founded SMA in early 2012 to help people in the capital markets make sense of Twitter without having to weed through individual tweets.  We could see the explosive growth trajectory of tweets – now at 750 million a day – and realized it would soon become impossible to use traditional tools to really understand the market pulse around these social conversations.   We learned to convert the Twitter fire hose into real-time streams of high signal predictive data.  We also learned that the methodology used to generate these data streams let us filter the fire hose for specific conversations in very valuable ways.

First, we filter accounts for quality based on programmatic algorithms.  We started this process to eliminate the spammers, scammers and pump-and-dump schemers.   It’s a critical step in finding the quality information.  Even with this filtering, we current certify 65,000+ Twitter accounts for capital markets conversations alone, more than one person could reasonably manage to follow.   Each approved account is then rated and weighted, again diagrammatically.  This step is interesting for a Topic Model format in that you can certify accounts for different topics to create an expert stream of signals on any topic.

Next, we generate our S-Factor metrics.  SMA Dashboard Clients are familiar with our S-Factor Alerts.  Let’s talk about what these can really do.  Let’s say you’d like to track conversations on new products, but you really only need to know when the excitement is extremely high/low, rapidly turning negative, very volatile or going viral.  By building a list of custom alerts on your specified Topics, you get only what you want, when you want it.   If you want to know of the slightest hint of trouble, you can specify tight thresholds.  Or you can set your threshold levels much higher and only get notified of extremely unusual conversation trends.   You can then drill down to the individual tweet level to get more granular level content.  You can also search on individual tweet scores and view just those tweets with high/low scores.

SMA will send you an e-mail or text alert when your specified alert limits are hit.  You can also track all changes in real-time on the Dashboard. Of course, we still have our high-powered API and all of this capability can be directly integrated into any client system.  From the start, we designed our technology to be source and search agnostic and given client demand, we’ve added additional data sources.   As we start tackling the conversations outside of finance, we welcome your interest in new Topics.

By Kim Gits, CFO