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Collective intelligence (CI) is a property of groups that emerges from the coordination and collaboration of members and predicts group performance on a wide range of tasks. Previous studies of CI have been conducted with lab-based groups in the United States. We introduce a new standardized online battery to measure CI and demonstrate consistent emergence of a CI factor across three different studies despite broad differences in (a) communication media (face-to-face vs online), (b) group contexts (shortterm ad hoc groups vs long-term groups) and (c) cultural settings (US, Germany, and Japan). In two of the studies, we also show that CI is correlated with a group's performance on more complex tasks. Consequently, the CI metric provides a generalizable performance measure for groups that is robust to broad changes in media, context, and culture, making it useful for testing the effects of general-purpose collaboration technologies intended to improve group performance.

Purpose -The paper's aim is to mine and analyze opinion formation on the basis of consumer dialogs in online forums. Design/methodology/approach -The study identifies opinions, communication relationships, and dialog acts of forum users using different text mining methods. Utilizing this data, social networks can be derived and analyzed to detect influential users and opinion tendencies. The approach is applied to sample online forums discussing the iPhone. Findings -Combining text mining and social network analysis enables the study of opinion formation and yields encouraging results. Out of the four methods employed for text mining, support vector machines performed best.Research limitations/implications -The data set applied here is fairly small. More threads on different products will be considered in future work to improve validation. Practical implications -The approach represents a valuable instrument for online market research. It enables companies to recognize opportunities and risks and to initiate appropriate marketing actions. Originality/value -This work is one of the first studies that combine communication content, relationships and dialog acts for analyzing opinion formation.

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