• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, October 27, 2015

IBM is making social media analytics more broadly accessible through a new collaboration with Twitter, which will make social insights drawn from the microblogging service available via its new data platform, IBM Insight Cloud Services, along with integration of open data sets and proprietary data. IBM also unveiled a parallel collaboration with The Weather Company.

IBM positioned the new Insight Cloud Services as a way to cut through the huge amount of clutter associated with Big Data to make sense of trends and better serve customers with consumer-facing products. The new products are aimed at clients in industries including retail, insurance, and media and entertainment.

The offering includes a number of products. One product, Industry Analytics Solutions, lets businesses tap data from multiple sources including Twitter and The Weather Channel, as well as third parties, to inform activities including merchandising, demand planning and market profiling. For example, companies might use IAS to correlate sales with factors including weather, events, news, trends, and social sentiment to discover predictive insights for marketing strategies.

A second product, Market Insights, will allow big consumer product and media brands to find out more about their customers’ interests and preferences based on social media commentary, enabling them to define new customer or audience segments and better allocate advertising spending.

A third product, Insight APIs for Developers, which allows developers to incorporate Twitter content from Decahose or PowerTrack streams, as well as weather data from The Weather Company, into Web and mobile apps for consumers. As an example, an insurance company could alert customers to adverse weather conditions in order to reduce claims and boost customer engagement and brand affinity.

Earlier this week, IBM announced another new product, Social Data Analysis, based on its high-profile Watson supercomputing service. Created in collaboration with StatSocial, a social media insights company, IBM’s Watson Personality Insights API analyzes social media and blog content to identify personality types, needs, and preferences for hundreds of millions of consumers globally.