Social media offers a valuable wealth of customer information, which complements data collected by traditional means.
For a business, listening to community sites like Facebook, LinkedIn et al Twitter, but also discussion forums and consumer opinions on this or that product or service, is a unique opportunity to obtain spontaneous feedback, and this on a scale inconceivable with other methods – target groups, surveys However, the technical issues are legion, starting with the need to determine the context in which customer comments fit and to identify themes and key ideas from unstructured text.
To help businesses take advantage of this growing wealth of information, new actors have appeared, deploying technologies and services such as crawling web pages, extracting data from websites, semantic interpretation…
Companies interested in active web monitoring can delegate all operations to an external service provider or develop the necessary capabilities internally.. This last decision must, however, be carefully considered., because technologies are evolving rapidly. We must therefore be careful not to lock ourselves into a solution that could weigh on future capabilities..
Social media also makes it possible to conduct market research with unprecedented speed and cost-effectiveness., and interact in real time with a wide range of customers. The company can thus acquire knowledge of customers comparable to that which it would obtain by questioning them directly or by forming target groups. – except that this process is long and expensive. These direct exchanges are also a good way for companies to measure themselves against the competition and gather valuable insights into what consumers like and don't like about them..
source http://www.lalibre.be