The Federal Reserve Bank of New York wants to know what you are Tweeting, Facebooking and YouTubing. Apparently, a simple Google search for posts about the Fed doesn’t suffice, as the bank has issued a request for proposal soliciting the creation of a “Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution,” which would allow it to gather all of the comments posted about it online and distinguish between positive and negative commentary.
The RFP, uncovered by the blog Zero Hedge on Sunday, calls for a far-reaching, customizable social dashboard that “must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms -Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube. It should also be able to aggregate data from various media outlets such as: CNN, WSJ, Factiva etc.”
It also specifies that the solution should “monitor billions of conversations and generate text analytics based on predefined criteria…also determine the sentiment of a speaker or writer with respect to some topic or document.”
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The Fed, for its part, has defended the proposal, saying it is simply one part of its larger PR revamp, which kicked-off in April with the first-ever public press conference from a sitting chairman in its 98-year-history.
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read it all:
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/the-federal-reserve-seeks-social-media-monitoring-program.php