Reuters Social Pulse Lets Social Media 'Make the Front Page'
Yesterday, news agency Reuters launched its new social media hub, which curates the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web. Called Social Pulse, it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines and to showcase the tweets of these influencers.
This new social media hub acts almost as a second front page for Reuters, as most of the stories featured are not Reuters stories (although the most popular Reuters stories can be found at the very bottom). Today, the three big topics are Obama, the economy, and the Susan G. Komen fiasco. None of these articles are from Reuters.
Another neat aspect of Social Pulse is the stock sentiment module, which features a graph that shows the correlation between a company's social sentiment and the company's stock price. It's interesting to see that with most of the companies, a high stock price means low social sentiment. This module features the opinions from hundreds of thousands of sources captured and curated by WiseWindow, which is a complex system that uses statistical techniques and natural language processing to deliver data that is not only real-time but predictive as well.
What makes Social Pulse so interesting is that its a chance for Reuters, and readers, to see what others think is important regarding the news. Although the content on the main front page is still determined by Reuters editors, by letting other smart, influential people be part of determining what goes into the news cycle, the news is still shaped in a way that's intelligent and useful to readers.
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