Technology that derives personality traits from Twitter updates is being tested to help target promotions and personalize customer service.
Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs–conscious or otherwise–from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.
“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” saysMichelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. “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.”