Executive summary. Delivering Maximum Strategic Value with Market Monitoring, страница 8

7 COLLABORATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA

The rapid growth of online social interaction has also opened up new possibilities in market monitoring. While the basic model of the market monitoring process, as presented earlier, follows a linear structure, information exchange can, and ideally does, also take place in a more complex fashion. We can identify at least three ways in which the process can be extended: •       New kinds of information sources (social media websites)

•  Market signals (field signals) coming directly from end-users, acting as a kind of 

                     feedback loop

•  Collaboration in the form of discussion about market signals, providing additional   insight to  market signals

Let us illustrate these possibilities and discuss each in turn.

The most straightforward way to benefit from social media is to tap into public social media as one additional source of information. Services such as LinkedIn, facebook, Twitter, and many more provide information about competitor actions, customer trends, and other potentially important topics. One has to keep in mind, however, that the information that can be extracted from these services is founded on open discussion between people and as such is generally subject to particular scrutiny in regards to its trustworthiness, thus requiring special attention in the processing stage of the monitoring process.

Using similar features and tools found on social media services, collaboration can be facilitated also within the market monitoring process. Some delivery formats such as web interfaces or mobile services can be outfitted with tools for user interaction such as commenting features, on-line discussions or rating mechanisms. These services can encourage decision-makers to participate in the market intelligence process and lead to providing additional information. The delivery of market signals to the decision-makers can thus induce the inflow of additional signals, or field signals, leading to a kind of feedback loop and therefore strengthening the entire process.

In addition to enabling the inflow of field signals, the collaboration tools, such as comments or discussions about market signals, also act as an additional validation mechanism for the original market signals. Although a market signal is evaluated already at the sourcing stage, and further scrutinized in the processing stage, its value can be enhanced even further when it is rated or discussed at the delivery stage. Rating mechanisms are widely used in any kind of on-line services, but for a market monitoring application, ratings that enhance the regular tagging mechanism would be of particular use. For example, letting decision-makers tag individual content items as, say, competitive threats or business opportunities will add additional context.

8 EARLY WARNING AND OPPORTUNITY

SYSTEM

We now elaborate on market monitoring systems designed specifically to help the formulation of strategies, called Early Warning and Opportunity Systems (EWOS). As was already explained, these are best set up after a market monitoring system for strategy implementation is already in place, because the basic structure is the same. What is different, however, is the coverage of information sources and the criteria for the relevance of incoming market signals. Furthermore, for all people involved in the process, the attitude towards uncertainty is likely to be different. For an EWOS, uncertainty is more acceptable and even desirable. Collaboration and social media are likely to play a much greater role in an EWOS compared to a regular market monitoring process.