IBM AND FACEBOOK JOIN FORCES IN CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT DRIVE

IBM said Facebook will be its first partner at a new ThinkLab that the company is building in San Francisco. IBM already has 12 ThinkLabs worldwide that focus on different areas from research and ecommerce to computational biology. Its San Francisco lab will be dedicated to customer engagement.

Jay Henderson, director of strategy within ExperienceOne, IBM’s customer engagement solutions says: “As technology accelerates, you need expertise and resources that sometimes aren’t available within your four walls and IBM is combining its data and its resources with Facebook experts to help brands find ways to better engage their customers.”

IBM customers will also be able to buy Facebook ads using combined data from Facebook and IBM’s Marketing Cloud. For Facebook, this partnership strengthens the social network’s ties with enterprise tools and its role as a marketing platform.