The technology and consulting giant IBM recently joined hands with the micro-blogging site Twitter. This partnership will peer into people-to-people communication and gather insightful leads from it. Today Twitter is one of the biggest social networking sites and IBM has been one of the legendary organizations of the computing world for a long time.

IBM will offer Twitter access to its cloud-based tools like IBM Watson Analytics. The IBM Watson is a major artificial intelligence breakthrough that makes sense of users’ queries more like a human and less like a machine. You don’t program the IBM Watson, you just work with it. It has cognitive capabilities that will assist in making sense of the data hidden in tweets, texts, reports, articles, and studies which make up to 80% of the world’s data. A search engine cannot make sense of all that and this is where the IBM Watson edges out the competition.

Hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals are connected via Twitter. Any trend happening on this micro-blogging site is of particular interest to digital marketers. Thus, Twitter can be seen as a trend synthesizer. On the other hand IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform helps business clients enrich their business decisions. Now with this partnership a new hitherto unheard class of data emerges to assist business leaders worldwide.

Twitter captures ideas, opinions and debates in the cyberspace. While attempts were long being made to make sense of this data, there did not exist a reasonable way to do it. IBM Watson now seems to be bridging that gap. It helps in detecting patterns, understand what people are expecting from brands so that digital marketers can react likewise. Digital marketers can now find out which marketing tactics work and which ones are a waste of company resources. It will offer new insights into industry-specific data to understand new market opportunities and partnerships. Enterprises can now unravel consumer behavior, know markets better and predict trends. Data professionals can now club Twitter data into IBM DataWorks™. Further IBM and Twitter have joined to create apps using IBM Watson Developer Cloud and IBM Bluemix that will help businesses in their marketing, finance and sales departments.

Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and Chief Executive of IBM, said: “Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world – as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesizer of trends. This partnership, drawing on IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work.”

Dick Costolo, Chief Executive of Twitter, added: “When it comes to enterprise transformation, IBM is an undisputed global leader in enabling companies to take advantage of emerging technologies and platforms. This important partnership with IBM will change the way business decisions are made – from identifying emerging market opportunities to better engaging clients, partners and employees.”

So how will this new marriage in the data world help you realize your business goals?

Do share your thoughts.