Using social media for gathering social intelligence and for decision making

Below is few highlights from an article by McKinsey that I read about how marketers can use social media for gathering intelligence and guiding decision making:

In many companies, marketers have been first movers in social media, tapping into it for insights on how consumers think and behave. As social technologies mature and organizations become convinced of their power, McKinsey believes that marketers will take on a broader role: informing competitive strategy. According to the article, social media should help companies overcome some limits of old-school intelligence gathering, which typically involves collecting information from a range of public and propriety sources, distilling insights using time-tested analytic methods, and creating reports for internal company “clients” often “siloed” by function or business unit. However today, many people who have expert knowledge and shape perceptions about markets are freely exchanging data and viewpoints through social platforms. By identifying and engaging these players, employing potent Web-focused analytics to draw strategic meaning from social-media data, and channeling this information to people within the organization who need and want it, companies can develop a “social intelligence” that is forward looking, global in scope, and capable of playing out in real time.

The article explores four distinct ways that marketers can use social technologies to augment the intelligence-gathering approaches of companies:

• From identifying data to mapping people and conversations: Social media creates a new information map. Competitive analysts today differentiate between primary sources of information (from experts, competitors, employees, and suppliers), on the one hand, and secondary sources (such as published data, articles, and market research), on the other. Social intelligence operates on a different plane, identifying people and their conversations in social spaces. Its logic is that if you can find the right “curators” and experts collecting and channeling vital, accurate information, that eliminates the need for extensive searches of traditional databases and published information. Identifying the right people ultimately should induce companies to join existing online conversations and even shape them. This real-time information may help preempt key actions of competitors or lead to adjustments of strategy.
• From data gathering to engaging and tracking: Analysts typically spend 80 percent of their time gathering information before they begin to analyze it. Social intelligence radically alters this process. Numerous tools allow analysts to create dynamic maps that pinpoint where information and expertise reside and to track new data in real time. The most effective way of obtaining new information is to engage a carefully mapped network of experts on specific subjects.
• From analysis and synthesis to structuring and mining: Availability of vast quantities of social-media data points has spawned an array of new analytic methods that can structure and derive insight from complex information. New analytic techniques employed, includes “buzz volume,” to isolate relevant messages about the company’s brand and those of competitors; “discussion topics,” which distills a random sample of messages about the company and each competitor and arrange them by the topics that arose in discussions; “qualitative insights,” targeting notable quotes from the messages; and “consumer sentiment,” categorizing messages as positive, negative, mixed, or neutral. Equally interesting is the range of sources that can be surveyed—blog entries, discussion boards, Usenet groups, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. 
• From reporting to curating and embedding: In the old approach, intelligence reports often are formal documents sent by e-mail, broadcast by corporate newsletters, or posted on intranets. Content sometimes covers the waterfront of competitive topics, and information can be dated by the time it gets into decision makers’ hands. By contrast, new social software now on the market lets companies rapidly, even automatically, curate highly pertinent information—from news sources, Web discussions by experts and influencers, freshly minted market data, and customer feedback. Almost any user within a company can create a personalized information dashboard, which “democratizes” intelligence and embeds relevant data deep within the organization.