Twitter vs Stock market as company success predictor.

When Marissa Mayer announced she was joining Yahoo on July 16th, Twitter was largely positive in its praise of her, but Yahoo's stock went down slightly - see graph above (on an announcement of flat results, on a day when the NASDAQ also went down slightly, so the Marissa Effect was at best neutral, maybe slightly negative)

Today, when Mark Thompson announced he was leaving the BBC to joing the New York Times Twitter was more sceptical ("UK Publicly Funded TV/Radio Broadcaster to be responsible for US Commercial Newspaper revenue" was typical) but the stock market price went up a bit.

In recent months Twitter has been hailed as a predictor of a company's future success, even it's stock price:

Want to predict what will happen in the stock market tomorrow? Just use Twitter, say Californian researchers. A team at the University of California has created a computer model which allows them to 'predict the future' of the stock market by scanning the social network. It has up to 11 per cent more accuracy than other computer models. Researchers found that scanning for volume of Tweets and how those Tweets linked to other subjects could 'predict' stock prices a day later - and outperformed other computer investment tactics. The software looks at volumes of Tweets containing references to companies or products, and how they link to Tweets on other subjects. It can predict both the volume of trading and the value of a stock the next day.

In the case of YHOO (Twitter +ve, Stock market slight fall) and NYT (Twitter sceptical, stock market slight rise) Twitter and the market are at odds. Be interesting to see where things are in a year or so's time. As the old adage goes, you can't buck the market......