 "IBM-created tech to help ads understand if you're introverted or extroverted")
The need to understand a person’s like and dislikes, their behaviour and actions, in order to target online advertisements at them is never ending. Marketers and advertisers all over the world are constantly trying to figure out ways in which brands can show the right kind of the ads to the right kind of people at the right time. IBM has decided to lend a hand by testing technology that can analyse tweets psychologically, with the goal of offering personalised customer service and better targeting for messages.
A report by MIT Technology Review talks about this piece of technology that aims to delve into the psychology of a Twitter user using just the content he posts on the micro-blogging website. “We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” Michelle Zhou, User Systems and Experience Research Group Lead at IBM’s Almaden research Center based in California says. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual — what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”
Your Twitter feed will tell advertisers if you’re extroverted
The software developed by the team takes into consideration the first hundred or thousand tweets – subject to API limits, of course – and puts them to test psychologically. It tests the same based on the “big five” traits of common psychological research: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. Also added to the mix are scores for measures on “values” like hedonism and conservatism and “needs” like curiosity and social harmony.
However, like most such technology, figuring out personality is not the end-game for this software. Zhou says that the team is working with several IBM customers in order to gauge how this software can use this system to foster their business. It could be used to tune marketing messages sent by email or via social media, identify the time when it should be displayed and point out at why certain messages work better than others. Zhou has a feeling that this software could help targeting in a way that conversion rates will increase.
She goes on to add that having a rough idea of a person’s personality could help achieve better customer satisfaction. Say for example, a call center executive has to tell a passenger that their flight has been cancelled, Zhou says that an extroverted person could request for frequent flyer miles or rewards, while a person identified as conscientious could just want efficiency, like wanting to know their next flight. Essentially, it could help the executives know whether they should just tell the passenger the news or get into deeper discussion with them.
The piece of technology analyses words and patterns to create a profile of a person from tweets alone. The team also made people answer psychological questionnaires to create a yardstick for these tests. If put to use on a wide scale, Zhou and her team’s technology could help transition online advertising – and even customer care relationships – into a more mature space.
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