“Social media used to be this cute project for 25-year-old consultants,” said Margaret Francis, vice president for product at Scout Labs in San Francisco. Now, she said, top executives “are recognizing it as an incredibly rich vein of market intelligence.”
via nytimes.com
interesting article. all this sentiment and preference mapping is like the work I did in the nineties with companies like ac nielsen, spectra marketing and information resources. by examining purchase behavior via scanner data from retailers, we drew inferences about the effects of pricing, advertising and merchandising, and product selection. with the growth of social media and the accompanying rise of opinion aggregators like scout labs and radian6, marketers will have a more direct and presumably accurate feed into consumer sentiment.