3 odd things IBM learned about people from studying Twitter

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Before IBM officially opened its new tweet analysis tool for business on Tuesday, it was testing the tool out with 100 companies.

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And in just a few short months of doing that, IBM learned some surprising discoveries, it said.

For instance:

Bad weather can make people want to ditch their telecom service. IBM explains: "By combining Twitter data with other information like rain, wind or snow that triggers service interruptions, IBM identified the correlation between weather events, angry Tweets and customer defections."

The more a customer shops at a particular store or eats at a particular restaurant, the more likely they are to stop shopping there when employees leave. It stands to reason that you would get to know the people at a place you patronize often, but IBM found that really loyal customers get so attached to employees that they complain on Twitter about having to "start over" if a favorite employee leaves. If they don't feel like employees know them, this can really impact revenue because the loyal customers are the ones who spend the most money.

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Psychoanalyzing the tweets of popular fashion bloggers can help clothing manufacturers predict which items will be big commercial hits and which won't. Or as IBM explains it: "By using psycholinguistic analytics from IBM Research to extract a full spectrum of psychological, cognitive and social traits from Twitter data that influential fashion bloggers generate - combined with operational data such as sales and market share information - manufacturers can better understand why some products sell well while others don't."

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