Perhaps recently you’ve been in a conversation with business friends when the topic of Twitter comes up. It usually goes something like this.

“I don’t get this Twitter thing. What’s the point?”

“Who has time?”

“Tweet, twit, I don’t even know the terminology.”

“You know it is interesting, I just don’t know what the business application would be.”

“One of those passing fads.”

Now comes news from Wall Street that Twitter isn’t just a potential business tool - tweets are moving markets. An academic study at Indiana University in Bloomington found a correlation between the collective mood of millions of people identified by tweets and the direction of the Dow Jones industrial average.

“We are in the early stages of a gold rush,” Johan Bollen, a professor of informatics at Indiana University, told USA Today. Bollen is co-author of the study linking Twitter mood measurement to stock market performance. “If you would have told anyone 10 years ago that this data would be available, they would have called it science-fiction. Analyzing millions of tweets is akin to a “large-scale emotional thermometer for society as a whole.”


Financiers have use low-tech tools like polling investors and newsletter editors. They also employ computer algorithms to speed read news stories. But that is lagging information compared to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They’re the city in cyberspace that never sleeps. Real-time, constant chatter.

As I was writing the chapter in my new book, Discover Your CEO Brand (Fall 2011) on CEOs and social media, I knew I had to answer the question - why bother with social media? Soon, I predict the question for CEOs will be, “Why WOULDN’T we?” With sophisticated mass monitoring, investors are already getting an up-to-the-minute trading edge. Pretty soon CEOs are going to be tuning into a lot of other real-time information they can glean, such as how people are feeling about their new products or the news that just broke about their company.

It’s only a matter of time before the scale tips and then Katie, bar the door. We are on the verge, scratch that, in the midst of a revolution. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be the last one to jump on this train.