Twitter And IBM Announce Partnership To Transform Enterprise Decisions

Twitter and IBM have announced a partnership that is intended to provide businesses with the ability to make better strategic decisions by linking Twitter’s stream of public data with IBM’s data crunching and consulting expertise.

The value of Twitter’s real-time data about consumer preferences is well understood by digital marketers, and the potential value that could be realized by combining this with IBM’s powerful analytics and engagement platforms as well as the company’s consulting services is certainly interesting to all types of businesses and advertisers.

Chris Moody, Twitter’s vice president of business development, explained the potential of this partnership in a blog post.  “From a data perspective, 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,” wrote Moody. “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.”

Twitter’s blog post continues by discussing the consistent interest from companies who are seeking guidance about how to incorporate Twitter data into their business operations. “Our relationship with IBM will directly address this need by training tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants on the business applications for Twitter data, as well as the technical and organizational changes needed to effectively weave this important resource into day-to-day business operations,” wrote Twitter.

Clearly, the intention of this partnership is to make Twitter data more valuable to businesses by helping to make decisions about the future operation of global enterprises. Twitter’s blog post explains that this announcement has been years in the making, with the social media giant having made massive progress in providing social data to decision makers.

IBM’s announcement explains that the results from this partnership will help to inform every business decision. “Twitter represents the public pulse of the planet,” wrote IBM. “Coupled with IBM’s industry-leading cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms and consulting services, together we have the potential to transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends.”

In its news release, IBM described some of the other features that the partnership with Twitter will leverage. “IBM and Twitter will deliver a set of enterprise applications to help improve business decisions across industries and professions,” wrote IBM. “The first joint solution will integrate Twitter data with IBM ExperienceOne customer engagement solutions, allowing sales, marketing, and customer service professionals to map sentiment and behavior to better engage and support their customers.”

There is certainly a buzz throughout the marketing industry about the developments that will be achieved through this partnership, and IBM’s news release provides a great deal of ideas to get excited about.

“IBM Global Business Services professionals will have access to Twitter data to enrich consulting services for clients across business,” IBM wrote in its news release. “Additionally, IBM and Twitter will collaborate to develop unique solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail, travel and transportation. The partnership will draw upon the skills of tens of thousands of IBM Global Business Services consultants and application professionals including consultants from the industry’s only integrated Strategy and Analytics practice, and IBM Interactive Experience, the world’s largest digital agency.”