IBM math wonk: Social media another source of data

All those emotional Tweets. Those blog rants. The guy going off about being scorned by a vendor. It's just another data set. 

Brenda Dietrich, vice president of business analytics & mathematical sciences at IBM Research, made the comments on a panel at Big Blue's Hawthorne, NY facility. 

As IBM execs were talking about fact-based businesses and better use of predictive modeling---across all industries---Dietrich was asked where does social media fit in. After all, social networking is becoming more important to companies. 

Deitrich said:

Social media another source of data that can be understood in context. 

She said that IBM has been "trying to better understand dialog out there on the blogs" and other areas and boiling down the words to data sets. 

By analyzing the words---say stars on a movie review---social interaction (often emotional) can be cooked down to data with "surprisingly high accuracy."

IBM is currently giving this monitoring data to IBM's business intelligence people.

Also see: IBM launches business analytics services unit; Eyes predictive modeling