Over the last couple of years, I've read a lot about how the rise of social media has lead to lots and lots of rich data- most of which was never available for researchers and marketers in the past. Most of the data-mining techniques I've read about centered around segmenting consumers and identifying ways to sell things to them.
But, I recently read this Economist article about how a group of researches can now gauge someone's personality reasonably well from as few as 50 tweets. This personality tracking measures the "big five" personality traits- openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. For example, according to the article, using the word "bar" correlates with extraversion and the word "awful" correlates with neuroticism.
While all this is interesting to read about and fun to talk about, the real implications of how these data-mining techniques can be use is a little bit frightening. I can see these techniques being used by employers to screen potential job candidates. They will no longer be only scanning for past employment history or ill-advised photos from a fun weekend- they could potentially collect a bunch of mundane tweets to create a personality profile. And we as individuals may not know what these profiles look like and may also not know how to actively manage it.
For more, here is the original article:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-21
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