Managing options

...In the old days, corporate intelligence gathering meant painstakingly gleaning information from experts and competitors' reports, subscribing to expensive online data aggregators such as Factiva or Dialog, and scanning unstructured documents from the media. Analysts typically spent 80% of their time gathering information before they even began trying to make sense of it. Once the sense-making began, intelligence experts used standard, outdated methods such as SWOT analyses and created lengthy internal reports. Not a very fast process, and the results were rarely compelling for senior executives. Even after the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the combination of clunky tools and executives' low social-media literacy hampered companies from extracting valuable insights.

A number of companies, B2C and B2B alike, now realize the potential benefits of monitoring conversation flows from social networks. An illustration is Nestlé's new Digital Acceleration Team, which was announced last month....
Via Robin Good, Jeff Domansky, Brian Yanish - MarketingHits.com