The use of social media by business professionals is growing rapidly. As a result, social media content can benefit more than just public relations professionals. Learn how you can take advantage of social media while doing business research and competitive intelligence for your enterprise.
People’s network have become incredibly influential in digital behavior
Not a surprise, at least 1 in 3 searches fail (probably generous)
Of course many of these sites deliver a browsing experience, general interest info
However, more and more people are turning to their network for discovery, as well as navigation
Social Search grows
But it was too hard to make yourself heard
You had to be a techie and know HTML
Or you had to use message boards or chat rooms, which had bad reputations (and you never knew which ones your friends may or may not be using)
Web 1.0 gave everyone the opportunity
New tools made it easy to participate
Social Media tools being adapted for business use
Barrier to entry, lower costs mean small business (under 100 employees) rapidly adopting social media as their communication platform with their customers
The concept of social CRM is emerging, Twitter/Facebook can actually give small business the ability work with their customer’s
Lower cost of entry, more social tools making it even easier to use
3 years ago, not many saw the influence twitter, facebook and others would have on the web
Content explodes, aggregation becomes more important
- Not because users can’t aggregate, but have a harder time knowing what to aggregate – source selection because key
Context, context, context. Social media is about conversations, the semantic web and linked-data will help provide context for those conversations:
- Ex: conversation about haiti tragedy marked up with link to haiti population according to world fact book.
Semantic web, linked data
Social Search grows
Finding information is becoming easier. Self-service research becomes easier – new tools (like WSJ Pro) are empowering the end user. As this paradigm shift continues, your ability to be an effective researcher will be limited by the value of your network
