Mining The Social Channel for Customer Gold

摘要

The social channel a.k.a. social media appears on first glance to provide a readily-extractable motherlode of information and insights that can help firms retain and build relations with customers and attract new ones. For in the huge volume of conversations: blogs, comments on sites e.g. TripAdvisor et al, Facebook postings and Tweets are concerns, complaints, experiences and ideas about companies' products and services, and the companies themselves that are waiting to be mined, assayed, refined and used. Yet as one spends any time on the social channel knows all too well, going through it is akin to mining in another way; there are an awful lot of tailings to be removed so one can yield a few nuggets of value. Blogs are often more hype than substance, blog and site responses too frequently border on the unintelligible and the insulting. Facebook conversations and Tweets are typically weighed down with minute details on individuals' lives.