IBM Announces Analytical Tools for Working with Twitter Databases

IBM and Twitter introduced the industry's first cloud services, which enable business professionals and developers to extract valuable information from Twitter data. In the process of implementing the project, IBM and Twitter worked closely with more than 100 clients, and today they provide corporate customers with the opportunity to use social data to make business decisions.

Twitter is unlike any other data source in the world, representing a global information platform for real-time dialogue on a wide variety of topics. In order to use Twitter data to make important decisions, business professionals must do more than conduct public opinion analysis - they must distinguish between signal and noise. IBM helps to achieve this by enriching and analyzing Twitter data in combination with millions of data sources from other information flows, such as weather forecasts, sales, inventory accounting. This approach allows you to find important connections that help make smarter decisions.

“Making business decisions depends a lot on internal data, such as sales, promotions and inventory information. Now, thanks to data coming from Twitter, customer feedback can be easily taken into account in the business decision making process, ”commented Chris Moody, vice president of data strategy for Twitter. “The unique capabilities IBM offers will help organizations tap into this valuable data.” We expect a rapid growth in demand for new services in the retail, telecommunications and financial sectors, as well as other sectors of the economy. ”
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IBM's new cloud analytics services will enable commercial organizations and developers to:

• Build social data-compatible applications: developers and entrepreneurs can find, learn, and retrieve enriched content from Twitter by gathering information through the IBM Insights for Twitter service on Bluemix.
• Combine predictive analytics with Twitter data: automating data curation, predictive analytics, and visual narration; Watson Analytics tools can provide business professionals with the ability to immediately embed Twitter data into any project in order to identify and explain the hidden features and relationships necessary to understand current and future processes.
• Easily integrate Twitter data: Thanks to BigInsights on Cloud's individual cluster configurations with built-in access to Twitter data, customers can combine information from Twitter with a full-featured Enterprise Hadoop-as-a-Service offer, also available on the IBM Bluemix platform.
• More than 4,000 IBM employees now have access to Twitter data and undergo training to enrich the data with the analytical capabilities of IBM solutions and cloud services.

IBM and Twitter offer businesses a wide range of business decision-making options by combining Twitter data with IBM analytics to extract valuable information. Cooperation with more than 100 clients allowed us to identify three key trends:

1. In a global economy, we are still dependent on geography. Different regions may show different levels of customer churn in the same market segment with identical data history.

Most of the telecommunications and media companies that are experiencing an outflow of subscribers have developed sophisticated analytical models in order to understand and predict customer turnover. The only insufficiently studied area is the influence of weather and other factors on events occurring within a particular region. By combining Twitter data with weather information that directly affects service interruptions, IBM identifies links between weather events, negative messages and customer churn. In turn, by helping to analyze localized Twitter data, combined with weather information, IBM provides an opportunity to significantly improve customer models (in some cases up to 5%) to reduce subscriber churn.

2. The turnover of personnel in the retail sector directly affects the behavior of the most loyal customers. Everything that happens within the four walls of an enterprise often becomes public domain thanks to social networks. Closed doors are a thing of the past.

IBM's analytic models have shown that consumers appreciate (and discuss on Twitter) relationships and relationships built with sales consultants. Especially it concerns the sphere of public catering, where tastes and preferences of the client are especially important. As soon as these connections disappear, consumers express their opinions on Twitter, feeling a sense of loss and dissatisfaction with the fact that “you have to start everything all over again.”
IBM examined Twitter data, as well as loyal customer information and financial performance of various stores and restaurants.

According to the results of the study, it was found out that dissatisfaction with personnel turnover directly affects sales, and the most loyal (and valuable) customers feel most dissatisfied. In one of the cases under consideration, 3.3% of the participants in the loyalty program, which brings together 6 million customers, brought the greatest profit to the organization and at the same time exerted the maximum impact on sales, making purchases online every day.

3. Thanks to the ability to obtain data on individual customer preferences, Twitter is a source of information on increasing or decreasing demand among buyers and provides a good picture of global trends.

Clothing manufacturers want to know what products and when to market, but the constantly changing trends in the retail sector and customer behavior complicate the task and set certain barriers for businesses. According to IBM, Twitter is an important indicator of the demand of the clothing market. Using IBM Research's psycholinguistic analysis tools to identify the full range of customers ’psychological, cognitive, and social characteristics based on Twitter data, and combining this information with sales data and market share, manufacturers can better understand the reasons for the increase or decline in sales. They can also improve product promotion strategies and contribute to the development of future products.

“The IBM and Twitter partnership helps enterprises analyze billions of cases of interaction between social network users and make smarter decisions,” said Glenn Finch, Head of Big Data & Analytics, IBM Global Business Services. “By combining with unique expertise and valuable information that is extracted, Twitter data now provides an opportunity to transform decision-making processes within organizations.”