Predicting Internal Metrics with Cultural Signals
Predictive Analytics
May 15, 2025
Discover how forecasting can transform your business analytics.
Culture Predicts Profits
Each year, billions of dollars are lost because companies miss economic signals buried in complex, cultural layers. A company's success is preceded by memetic inertia, or "units of culture" that are passed from one person to another. These units could be anything from beliefs, grammar, content editing styles, aesthetics, songs, etc. While seemingly insignificant or just "micro-trends", these units can carry enough inertia that ultimately effect macro-economic outcomes.
Knowing:
What units impact you the most
Which internal metrics they impact most
What you can do about it
Is what will separate companies going forward. The faster you know this information, the further ahead you'll be from your competitors.
Predicting Culture with Social Listening
Most social listening tools are designed for marketers, community managers, market researchers, or PR strategists. They work great for these personas because they're built to track keywords. Social listening tools typically have you configure something they call a "Boolean Query", which is basically a list of keywords you're looking to track with conditional logic and constraints.
While great for tracking what people are saying about your brand, seeing if #coffee is trending, or dissecting how people are talking about a specific topic, it's not good for automatically predicting culture and its impact.
Why?
Because with culture, we don't know what we're looking for until it arrives.
What's needed instead:
To predict KPIs with cultural data, you need to consider EVERYTHING. This means no configuration: you don't set up booleans, you don't track keywords or hashtags, you have to analyze the entirety of social media.
"How is that possible, there's so much noise out there, how will it find what's important to me?" - some reader, possibly
You do what social media platforms do themselves: build a custom algorithm.
In order to sift through all the noise and surface what's important, every company needs their own custom algorithm. This can be based on search behavior, chat behavior, what you click on, spend time reading, etc. just like social media platforms do for consumers.
More importantly, this algorithm needs to be based on what creates an impact. Real revenue metrics, operations metrics, supply chain metrics, etc.
Why nobody does this:
It's extremely difficult, and really wasn't possible without the latest advancements in AI, unless you had infinite budget and a massive team of ML engineers. Now, it's entirely possible with just a small team (hi!).
How Siftree Predicts Profits By Predicting Culture
We connect your internal data do our cultural signals, isolate signals that statistically impact your internal metrics, and build a custom model and custom algorithm that knows your company better than humanly possible.
Now that we know what impacts you, we're able to find similar signals that are continuously emerging and quantify the impact and predict when that impact will happen (e.g "~5 weeks from now, expect an 8% lift in SKU-level sales for [x] product").
To summarize:
We spot signals that are similar to previous ones, as they're emerging,
Analyze their initial inertia, predict if they will continue to propagate
If so, quantify impact based on similar signals' impacts
Notify you before measurable impact
The steps are quite simple, but requires a lot math and computing power, which we handle for you. When we're done implementing the solution, you now have a comprehensive platform connecting social, marketing/GTM, strategy, finance, and operations data, helping you make better decisions across your entire company.
Culture Predicts Profits
Each year, billions of dollars are lost because companies miss economic signals buried in complex, cultural layers. A company's success is preceded by memetic inertia, or "units of culture" that are passed from one person to another. These units could be anything from beliefs, grammar, content editing styles, aesthetics, songs, etc. While seemingly insignificant or just "micro-trends", these units can carry enough inertia that ultimately effect macro-economic outcomes.
Knowing:
What units impact you the most
Which internal metrics they impact most
What you can do about it
Is what will separate companies going forward. The faster you know this information, the further ahead you'll be from your competitors.
Predicting Culture with Social Listening
Most social listening tools are designed for marketers, community managers, market researchers, or PR strategists. They work great for these personas because they're built to track keywords. Social listening tools typically have you configure something they call a "Boolean Query", which is basically a list of keywords you're looking to track with conditional logic and constraints.
While great for tracking what people are saying about your brand, seeing if #coffee is trending, or dissecting how people are talking about a specific topic, it's not good for automatically predicting culture and its impact.
Why?
Because with culture, we don't know what we're looking for until it arrives.
What's needed instead:
To predict KPIs with cultural data, you need to consider EVERYTHING. This means no configuration: you don't set up booleans, you don't track keywords or hashtags, you have to analyze the entirety of social media.
"How is that possible, there's so much noise out there, how will it find what's important to me?" - some reader, possibly
You do what social media platforms do themselves: build a custom algorithm.
In order to sift through all the noise and surface what's important, every company needs their own custom algorithm. This can be based on search behavior, chat behavior, what you click on, spend time reading, etc. just like social media platforms do for consumers.
More importantly, this algorithm needs to be based on what creates an impact. Real revenue metrics, operations metrics, supply chain metrics, etc.
Why nobody does this:
It's extremely difficult, and really wasn't possible without the latest advancements in AI, unless you had infinite budget and a massive team of ML engineers. Now, it's entirely possible with just a small team (hi!).
How Siftree Predicts Profits By Predicting Culture
We connect your internal data do our cultural signals, isolate signals that statistically impact your internal metrics, and build a custom model and custom algorithm that knows your company better than humanly possible.
Now that we know what impacts you, we're able to find similar signals that are continuously emerging and quantify the impact and predict when that impact will happen (e.g "~5 weeks from now, expect an 8% lift in SKU-level sales for [x] product").
To summarize:
We spot signals that are similar to previous ones, as they're emerging,
Analyze their initial inertia, predict if they will continue to propagate
If so, quantify impact based on similar signals' impacts
Notify you before measurable impact
The steps are quite simple, but requires a lot math and computing power, which we handle for you. When we're done implementing the solution, you now have a comprehensive platform connecting social, marketing/GTM, strategy, finance, and operations data, helping you make better decisions across your entire company.