Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011, as news about a Federal Reserve request for a “social listening” platform. It is not stated whether the tool was ever contracted or built.
The US Federal Reserve has called for the creation of a social listening platform to monitor any comment made about it. The job of this “tool” will be to gather data from all media outlets, news and conversations about the Fed.
It will need an algorithm capable of monitoring billions of conversations and running text analysis to determine the “sentiment” of each comment (positive or negative). It will have to collect data from the main social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and forums, and aggregate data from media outlets such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and so on.
It must be able to identify and reach the most influential bloggers in every part of the world.
According to the requirements, the platform must deliver relevant conversations in real time and analyze the speaker’s sentiment around the key topics of conversation: positive, negative or neutral. It must provide high-level summaries of a specific set of topics, and it must have a configurable dashboard that several internal analysts and managers can access easily.
These are just a few of the hundreds of requirements the “social listening” platform software must meet. I don’t want to be the one to sound the alarm, but come on, this is what used to be called spying.
Needless to say, Americans aren’t very happy about the news now that they know what the Fed wants to do. Some have voiced an understandable concern: if you speak well of the system, you can rest easy, but… if you make a negative comment… What would happen, and what would they want that information for?
Featured image: Tim Evanson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
