Can Twitter predict next week’s sales figures?

A trio of writers at The Wall Street Journal believes Twitter is an ideal prediction engine for your company’s sales. “Imagine a company is releasing a new product into the marketplace and has spent a lot of money on advertising to create a ‘buzz,’” Huaxia Rui, Andrew Whinston and Elizabeth Winkler wrote in WSJ . “Our model would allow the company to track the buzz, determine whether the overall opinion is positive or negative and focus on specific areas of the country…