Twitter Predicts Sales

What do you think the above chart is ?

It shows the predicted box-office revenue of new movies, by Hollywood Stock Exchange ( green ) and Twitter users ( blue ). Almost the same, isn’t it ?

Social Computing Labs at HP discovered in a study that using only the rate movies are mentioned on Twitter could successfully predict future revenues of the movies.
If you add the nature of the tweet ( reaction to the movie ) to the equation, the results were even more accurate.
These results were as accurate as the predictions by Hollywood Stock Exchange ( HSX ), which is been considered the best movie sales predictor to date.

They used 3 million tweets for the research and movies included Avatar, Twilight and Blind Side. Bernardo Humberman, was the chief investigator.

As the authors acknowledge too, this method can be extended to a large variety of topics and it shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, if accurately tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate outcome of future sales. Now, how about applying this to airlines ? New product launch, or route research for a new destination launch ?

The full report in PDF format could be found here .

( Hat tip to Kevin Kelly for noticing this back in April )