Social media has ratcheted up the stakes associated with sentiment investing, as the 24-hour news cycle and Twitter create a deluge of data points about companies that need to be sifted.

Infinigon Group, a three-year-old financial technology company founded by Alicia Belzberg and Sid Belzberg of Belzberg Technologies, was created to provide industries with real-time social media analytics that empower businesses with information on critical events as they unfold.

Echo, new its social-media analytics platform, delivers real-time predictive intelligence meant to help businesses increase efficiency and mitigate risk.

“There’s a lot more going on in social media with big data, where traders or portfolio managers or risk managers or even research analysts know exactly what they’re looking for and can use social media analytics to pull out those topics and find trends and do analysis around them,” said Dan Watkins, head of sales and marketing at Infinigon. “Companies are traded on all types of metrics, but there are other things that happen within a company that you may not know about. We capture all the products that are associated with a company, and that generates other types of specific patterns and models that we see in the social-media marketplace.”

There is a seemingly infinite amount of information disseminated through social media platforms. An increasing number of traders have tried to exploit of this, with uneven results. “What we found is you need to score what’s important and not give such a high credibility towards what’s not important,” said Watkins. “Take Microsoft. Whenever it’s spoken about, 80% of the time has a negative connotation. If you just track Microsoft in social media, your range will be way off. You’ll think that there are negative things happening when there aren’t.”

Echo can detect information about companies that can affect their stock price by capturing and analyzing social media data streams, according to Watkins. Users can set up custom data streams and set up quantitative and qualitative alerts against them to glean information.

“We have created an intricate method of matching social media captures (such as tweets) to a series of topics,” said Watkins. “We will help customers create any topic they want to track, including but not limited to stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities. Customers can then create custom alerts or use our out-of-the-box ones against their topics to find specific (e.g. FDA decisions) or unplanned events (e.g. recall notices).”

Featured image via See-ming Lee/Flickr under Creative Commons