IBM’s Deal with Twitter should Fascinate Marketers

If you are a sports buff looking at acquiring the latest in your field from DLF Promenade shopping mall, chances are that you would have downloaded an IBM powered app on your phone.  The IBM solution, according to the company release, can identify potential customers like you and extend necessary discounts that may have a strong interest in sports. The opt-in service can be downloaded by anyone to experience renewed efficacy in shopping.

The company’s solution for DLF combines technologies like social, mobile, analytics and cloud by remotely controlling sensors on smartphones from a cloud platform, and performing real-time analytics to convert mobile data into meaningful consumable information. Through this, back-end enterprise applications can analyse and transmit contextual data to customers. Did I say mobile and contextual data? Yes. Mobile is pivotal to our online and offline life, isn’t it? Our extensive and excessive reliance on the device is a draw for marketers lurking around consumers for personalizing our experience with their businesses. In this context, the alliance between technology giant IBM and the digital social networking facilitator, Twitter should fascinate marketers. IBM will be able to harness and extract actionable insights from Twitter’s unmatched wealth of digital natives’ data and empower marketers who can in turn serve their customers in the most opportune moment using a device they will increasingly spend their digital time.

The company’s solution for DLF, divulged in January of this year, now seem to be a curtain raiser. Consider the company’s deal with Cupertino, Calif.-based consumer tech giant, Apple to build more than 100 custom-built enterprise apps for Apple's iPad and iPhone customers in retail, healthcare, and other vertical industries. Now, imagine leveraging Twitter data to power these apps? Data is indeed the new natural resource and IBM seems to be accumulating aplenty.

Conversation is the New Advertising

Popular social media sites Facebook and Twitter enable aggregation of related conversations. Example, favorite television shows to sporting events to the latest news. One who wishes to amass data on couch potatos can now do it effortlessly. For marketers, destinations like Facebook and Twitter are gold mines with specific details - how many people on Facebook or twitter talked about a particular subject, where exactly is the buzz, popularity among males or females, and age groups – all available in a jiffy. 

I was privy to a quick but slightly lengthy conversation about the best calling cards outside India. While several of them narrated their ordeal after using a particular brand while traveling abroad, some of them passed on suggestions of other brands adding their wonderful experience having used it. For marketers, it will help if they keep in mind that such conversations can be easily recalled these days by potential customers who increasingly rely on user reviews. An airline’s alleged fascist approach to some of its select passengers; ill-treatment of guests by a renowned hotel are conversations that are unbridled in the social media. Can marketers intervene and protect or promote their brand? Yes, of course. Having complained about a new Nokia smartphone that I had bought on social media, the company’s social media custodian quickly reached out to me to resolve the issue. The immediate response put me to ease and reinforced my trust in the brand. 

According to Nielsen’s 2012 State of the Media Report, 1 in 3 social media users now prefer to contact brands using social media rather than the phone. In this increasingly transparent world, businesses would do well if they lower their center of gravity to the digital realm. And, embrace a culture that encourages continuous engagement of customers and employees rather than a one-way communication. Forward looking businesses have a top-down approach to this. In an article that appeared in Forbes, CEO of Weber Shandwick had this to say. “To give you a sense of how valued a social CEO is, our global study found that 76 percent of executives think that it is a good idea for their CEOs to be social. Among their reasons for favoring their CEO’s social participation is how it reflects internally – 52 percent feel inspired by their CEO’s sociability. Looking externally, 69 percent say that it enhances the company’s market credibility. And in general, social CEOs are much more likely to be seen as good communicators than unsocial CEOs – 55 percent vs. 38 percent, respectively.”