Off Balance: Bank of England's Twitter strategy lost in translation
BoE's attempt at harnessing the power of social media sees them learn more about American Football
BoE's attempt at harnessing the power of social media sees them learn more about American Football
OMG. Those clever number-crunchers at the Bank of England set up an experiment to see if Twitter could help predict a run on a bank.
Concerns had been raised in the lead-up to last year’s Scottish independence referendum, which Governor Mark Carney had warned “could raise financial stability issues”.
So they wrote a programme to analyse tweets (there’s 500 million of them every day). Suddenly, on 15 September, there was a spike in the number of tweets containing the words ‘run’ and ‘RBs’. Were queues of anxious depositors about to start forming outside the Royal Bank of Scotland?
Nope – it was tweets about the Minnesota Vikings game. ‘RBs’ referred to ‘Running Backs’, not ‘RBS’. “We learnt a lot about social media analysis,” says the slightly embarrassed Bank, “and a little about American Football.”
ROTFL, as they probably don’t say at the Bank of England.
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