Find Your Positivity with Chevrolet and Watson

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A positive, never-give-up attitude has been a driving force for Chevrolet for more than a century – thanks in large part to the determination and competitive nature of our founder, Louis Chevrolet. Louis’ desire to win on the track, led to innovations to make a more competitive car. And for more than a century the team at Chevrolet has adopted Louis’ competitive nature and his never-give-up attitude to make the impossible possible – for us, that is what it really means to Find New Roads.

We know that for our team to succeed, we need everyone to adopt the same positive, anything is possible attitude that Louis embodied; and that got us thinking about how positive we are in our lives away from the office and how that affects our personal interactions and growth. And that is how we got to the Global Positivity System.

The Global Positivity System is a tool designed to give users an understanding of how positive they are across their social channels which can lead to discovering new experiences in life. It is the result of Chevrolet’s first consumer-facing marketing project with IBM and it started with a simple belief: that we can grow positivity around the world by celebrating it.

We settled on building a tool that would show people just how positive they are, particularly where many people share their feelings the most: social media. By showing people their positive impact on their social network, we believed we could keep that positivity at the front of their minds as they moved through their day.

During the development process, we stressed the need to make something that was simple, effective and, most importantly, accurate. With something as complex as interpreting tone and sentiment on social media, we knew we needed the best tools at our disposal. The IBM Watson platform really lent our idea some legs.

Watson’s primary role is to parse the text of the social posts so that they can be analyzed. Watson allows the platform to identify positive keywords that were used the most over those posts. The Personality Insights API gives the tool the ability to glean personality characteristics and users’ “top traits” based on the content they posted and shared. We then encourage users to Find New Roads based on those traits, like picking up a new hobby or visiting a museum.

AlchemyLanguage is responsible for the tool’s sentiment analysis, developing a social personality profile based on the text Watson has indexed. It is also responsible for showing users their most positive and least positive posts.

Together, these two complex platforms allow us to build an index – shown as a score out of a possible 200 points – so users can see just how positive they are compared to friends, family and the Global Positivity System community.

We appreciate the work of the IBM team and the tremendous expertise that allowed us to make this unique tool possible.

Finally, I would like to encourage all of you to reflect on your own outlook by using the Global Positivity System and to consider the possibilities in your lives.