ARMONK, N.Y., March 17, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM)
and Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) today announced the availability of
industry-first cloud data services that allow business
professionals and developers to extract actionable business
insights from Twitter data. With more than 100 early client
engagements underway, the IBM and Twitter global partnership is
already helping enterprise clients apply social data to business
decisions.
Twitter is like no other data source in the world. It is a
real-time, public, conversational and global information platform
where voices from around the world are speaking about every topic
imaginable.
But for business professionals to do more than social listening
– to be able to use Twitter data to inform their organization's
most essential decisions -– they must first isolate the signal from
the noise. IBM does this by enriching and analyzing Twitter data in
combination with millions of data points from other streams of
public and business data – such as weather forecasts, sales
information and product inventory stats – to uncover powerful
correlations that drive more actionable insights.
"So much of business decision making relies on internal data
such as sales, promotion and inventory. Now with Twitter data,
customer feedback can easily be incorporated into decision making,"
said Chris Moody, Vice President of
Data Strategy at Twitter. "IBM's unique capabilities can help
businesses leverage this valuable data, and we expect to see rapid
demand in retail, telecommunications, finance and more."
The new IBM analytics services on the cloud will help businesses
and developers:
- Create Social Data-Enabled Apps:
Developers and entrepreneurs can search, quickly explore and then
mine enriched Twitter content and aggregated insights through IBM's
Insights for Twitter service on IBM Bluemix.
- Merge Sophisticated, Predictive Analytics
with Twitter Data: By automating the steps of data curation,
predictive analysis and visual storytelling, Watson Analytics can
give business professionals the ability to immediately pull Twitter
data into any project in order to help identify and explain hidden
patterns and relationships to accelerate the understanding of why
things happen and what's likely to happen.
- More Easily Analyze Twitter Data: With
select cluster configurations of BigInsights on Cloud
pre-configured with access to Twitter content, clients can combine
Twitter data with IBM's full-featured Enterprise
Hadoop-as-a-Service offering also available through IBM
Bluemix.
More than 4,000 IBM professionals now have access to Twitter
data and are trained to enrich the data with analytics capabilities
from IBM industry solutions and cloud-based services.
New Social Insights from IBM and Twitter Can Help Drive
Better Business Decision-Making
IBM and Twitter offer enterprises an edge to empower business
decisions through the combination of Twitter's vast and unique
overview of what the world is saying together with IBM's unrivaled
analytic power to create actionable insights for business
decision-makers. Here are the top three social insights drawn from
over 100 early engagements:
1. Geography is Not Destiny: It's a global economy, but
we're all still very local. Geographic areas can show significant
variance in churn even across subscribers in the same marketing
segment with the same data history.
Most subscription-based telecommunications and media companies
that are subject to high churn rates have developed sophisticated
analytic models to understand and predict customer turnover. What's
not well understood is the influence of factors like weather or
other point-in-time events, within defined geographic areas. By
combining Twitter data with other information like rain, wind or
snow that triggers service interruptions, IBM identified the
correlation between weather events, angry Tweets and customer
defections. By helping analyze localized Twitter data combined with
weather data, IBM can significantly improve churn models – in one
case by 5 percent – and help a client take actions to minimize
turnover.
2. The Inside is the Outside: Employee turnover within
retail businesses directly affects your most loyal customers. What
happens privately inside your four walls often goes public via
social conversations. There are no more closed doors.
IBM analytic models have shown that consumers value, and Tweet
about, the relationship they build with sales associates,
particularly in food service where individual tastes and
preferences are important. Once a relationship is removed consumers
also Tweet, but this time expressing a sense of loss for the
relationship and their dissatisfaction with having to 'start over.'
IBM looked at Twitter data along with loyalty information and the
financial performance of different stores and restaurants. Not only
did dissatisfaction with employee turnover impact sales negatively,
the dissatisfaction was most keenly felt by the most loyal (and
valuable) customers. In one study the impact was highest with a
consumer cluster that represented just 3.3 percent of the total
customer population (over six million in the loyalty program) – yet
these customers have some of the highest gross margins for the
retailer and shop virtually every day.
3. Fashion Forward with Social Insight: Twitter is an
effective demand signal for the apparel industry because as focused
as it may be on individual commentary, this creates a compelling
picture of worldwide trends.
Manufacturers want to know what products to make and when, but
constantly changing retail trends and habits make it harder to
understand and respond to demand. IBM found that Twitter is a
valuable indicator of demand for the apparel industry and other
manufacturers. By using psycholinguistic analytics from IBM
Research to extract a full spectrum of psychological, cognitive and
social traits from Twitter data that influential fashion bloggers
generate - combined with operational data such as sales and market
share information - manufacturers can better understand why some
products sell well while others don't. They can also improve
merchandising strategies and provide input to future product
development.
"The unprecedented partnership between IBM and Twitter helps
businesses tap into billions of real-time conversations to make
smarter decisions," said Glenn
Finch, Global Leader of Big Data & Analytics for IBM
Global Business Services. "Through unique expertise, curation and
insights Twitter data is now able to inform decision-making far
inside organizations."
For more information regarding the new Twitter and IBM
collaboration, please visit www.ibm.com/IBMandTwitter or
https://blog.twitter.com/ibm, and follow the conversation at
#IBMandTwitter.
CONTACT: Vineeta Durani Communications, IBM 917-855-2680
vineeta.durani@us.ibm.com Elaine Ellis Communications, Twitter
720-252-8105 ereddy@twitter.com
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SOURCE IBM