IBM Teams Up With Twitter for Social Media Data Analysis
The collaboration between IBM and Twitter will allow brands to incorporate Twitter's social data into other data sources in an effort to improve marketing decision-making.
A new IBM and Twitter partnership will see Big Blue bring its big data analytics capabilities to the social site to help give brands more data insights.
The platform is hosted in the cloud on IBM’s BlueMix platform and is designed to help businesses gain a better understanding of their data by incorporating social media data, which should improve decision-making.
By plugging this into IBM’s Watson Analytics platform, companies can cross-reference social data to other data streams from sales charts to weather data. A video at the bottom of this article shows a demonstration from IBM of this in action.
IBM says it already has 4,000 staff trained up to show clients how to use the platform and that 100 early testers using the services have already seen benefits.
Twitter says the move would help businesses incorporate social feedback data into their decision-making.
“So much of business decision-making relies on internal data such as sales, promotion, and inventory,” says Chris Moody, vice president of digital strategy at Twitter. “Now with Twitter data, customer feedback can easily be incorporated into decision-making.”
Moody says this will make it possible for firms to have a clearer insight into why products sold well, or didn’t, and how to act on this information.
“Twitter represents an enormous public archive of human thought that captures the ideas, opinions, and debates taking place around the world on almost any topic at any moment in time,” he said in a blog post.
“While companies have long listened to what their customers are saying on Twitter, complex enterprise decisions often require input from a lot of different systems. IBM’s expertise is in integrating complex systems and data to make better decisions.”
IBM chief executive (CEO) Ginni Rometty says the partnership is a great example of IBM bringing its powerhouse computing to new areas such as social media.
“This partnership, drawing on IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work,” she says.
The move is another tie-up between IBM and other technology players in the market, after its recent deal with Apple to launch enterprise-focused apps for iPhones and iPads, and the launch of a BlackBerry tablet that contains IBM technology.
This article was originally published on V3.
