(CNN) -- Social media sites have evolved into the global equivalent of the office watercooler, but could the buzz they generate be analyzed to predict real-world outcomes? Leading British economist Noreena Hertz thinks so. She believes analyzing the chatter from Twitter and Facebook for example, will become a dominant force in the business of forecasting. "Over the past few years I have been really quite obsessed with how technology is changing the way that we make sense of the world," she told CNN at Names not Numbers, an idea-sharing and networking conference in the UK. Read more: Facebook's new Graph Search tool
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Noreena Hertz is an economist who predicted global financial crisis three years before it hit
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She believes social media can be a powerful forecasting tool for business and government
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Hertz correctly predicted who would win talent show "X Factor" by analyzing social media
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