Understand How People See You Socially – Take the IBM Watson Twitter Personality Analyzer

By Evan Kirstel @evankirstel

Admittedly, as a leading social influencer, I am interested in what people think of my “social personality” as much as I am in providing social media content. As an avid writer, and more importantly, presenter, commentator and conversationalist, the language we speak, what people hear and understand should be equally important parts of our lives. A saying I have used for a long time, coming from a colleague named Tom Cross, provided this insight, “Communication will always fail except by chance.” This means, among other things, we speak so much and understand so little. The more we communicate, the less we know, and now know we know increasingly less.

A key point is that we now have millions and millions of words each day available to us and even the most avid reader begins to become overwhelmed in the breadth and depth in the media communications stream. Bringing to a practical point of this article is to understand your personality rather how people view you on Twitter (TWTR), not after a few cocktails. Whether you think you know and what people really think about you, but do you really know? The amount of knowledge about who we are becomes less reliable as the amount of it increases. This really means the amount of analysis of conversational communications requires a serious discussion into the nature of this kind of communication.

Many issues are raised like:

1) What do we think people are saying about us in public or in private,
2) What do we expect these conversations will tell us about what we are asking which leads to
3) Will we understand what they are telling us,
4) What should we do about what they tell us and within that aspect will they tell us what we are looking for not out thinking this communication parlay (The Hawthorne Effect),
5) Will we just spend a lot of time wasted on analysis ending up in some kind of analysis-paralysis.

A great colleague said, “If you really want to know what people think, go see them without any planned survey. Just sit down with them and listen, really listen to what they have to say.” That is more valuable than millions of dollars in surveys designed by people who really don’t understand what customers really want. I leave this short briefing and introduction with a quite automated personality test if you have a Twitter account.

According to IBM (IBM), the IBM Watson Twitter Personality Analyzer can help “Gain insights into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do. This service applies linguistic analytics and personality theory to infer attributes from a person’s unstructured text.” Click here for test. Of course, the results may not match who you really are but frankly, is quite interesting and revealing about what others including what machine learning thinks about you.

Summary – Learning about yourself is important in nearly everything we do especially to the ones we really care about and improving the perception of how others see us can give us insights into being better people in the things we hope to do.