Asserting that “Fast data is sometimes better than Big Data,” Alistair Rennie, general manager of IBM Business Analytics, proudly announced a partnership that treats a real-time feed from Twitter as raw material to fuel insights, output and revenue opportunities for Big Blue’s cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services, respectively. Borrowing the title of Jim Metzner and the National Science Foundation’s syndicated radio show Chris Moody, vice president in charge of Twitter Data Strategy, characterized the micro-blogging service as the “pulse of the planet.” He noted that information that appears in tweets always precede coverage in popular news channels and, in many important instances, does so hours in advance of general public awareness.

On a day that Twitter’s stock price was in decline thanks to what many financial analysts perceived as a decline in “user engagement” metrics, the connection with Watson has the potential to incorporate user Tweets into enterprise customer engagement platforms. As described in the press release, “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.” This pits IBM against the likes of NICE Systems, Verint, Oracle, PegaSystems, Salesforce.com and dozens of smaller companies who are subjecting conversations with customers (be they spoken, texted, typed or, now, tweeted) to real-time scrutiny to support the increasingly important functions involved with “customer engagement management” (CEM).

IBM has already started to train an army of service professionals (consultants), soon to be 10,000 strong, to make sure clients and developers take best advantage of opportunities to incorporate Twitter-based feeds and Watson-based cognitive computing into enterprise workflows – between and among employees, customers and prospects. As we noted here in January, IBM’s Watson Group has created an “instant ecosystem” of consultants, developers and integrators who are poised to transform how all of us communicate and carry out commerce. This focus on customer engagement muddies the line drawn between Watson Engagement Advisor, announced in May 2013, and Watson’s more general Analytics and Cognitive Computing specialties; but it does so that were predictable and driven by organic demand for real-time understanding of user input and rapid recognition (or prediction) of customer intent.

Subjecting Tweets to Watson’s cognitive power and IBM’s analytical resources holds great promise for both companies.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Twitter, Big Data, predictive analytics, IBM Watson, Customer Engagement