Brandwatch global Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Will McInnes wants you to think how much the world has changed in the last 10-20 years. From business, education, globalization, politics and the rise of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries, McInnes said, "It's astonishing."

At the final day of the Social Media World Forum (SMWF) in New York City, McInnes spoke on the future of social intelligence.

"We're no longer just in one place, at one time, or very rarely," McInnes said. "Think about the groups that you're connecting to, how they overlap and how they connect. And within that, think about knowledge and learning intelligence."

According to the Brandwatch CMO, intelligence is defined as "The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills." He noted both "acquire" and "apply" are crucial to ideas.

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"To me, Wikipedia is this amazing thing," he said. "I think we're going to look back at Wikipedia like how we look back at cute, sweets, nostalgic, pathetic memory of the way the world used to be. It's like an accident, but it turns out most of us use most links as a reference point."

For McInness, even a piece of knowledge "is never further away" than Wi-Fi availability on an iPhone. The world has shifted where people used to access knowledge and still talk about intelligence instead of accessing knowledge from trusted and authoritative sources journalists and newspapers, from offline and physical networks, politicians and CEOs to a world now where "vast pools" of smart data are available to everyone.

He recognized Yelp as "powerful" as well as LinkedIn's endorsements function.

"What other people say about you is going to be way more powerful than what you say about you," McInnes said, noting we all are going to be "Yelped."

"Complete strangers now form some of the biggest decisions of our lives. Think about how all these star rating systems are from people you never met and never will meet, but we trust them," McInnes said. "We buy into these systems that underwrite key decisions that we make."

In understanding and improving social intelligence, McInnes outlined four areas: from "what happened?" to "what's going to happen?"; from small pockets of social insight to distributed intelligence; from passive data to active and physical insights; and from what we know and what we don't know to discovering white space conversations.

McInnes stated much of social media analytics is "stuff" that's known to others -- such as a person upset with a customer service experience -- but there's another opportunity available.

"According to our own analysis in 2013, we found that 3.6 percent of all conversations online mentioned a brand," McInnes said, noting that as a result, nearly 96 percent of a conversation is being missed and therefore presents opportunities for engagement and learning.

Massive computing power has also become important in the social intelligence field.

"Power that is unimaginable decades ago and that is accelerating," he said. "Computing power is getting thinner, lighter, more energy efficient, and faster."

For example, the computing power of an iPhone 5 is over a thousand times faster and contains more 250,000 times more storage than the computing power of the Apollo 11.

For the future of social intelligence, Inness concluded, "Think about massive computing with radically more information, data sources, and transparency, and some kind of crazy, wearable immersive world that we live in."

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For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.

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