Maybe your background is in traditional marketing or perhaps you work in a technical or customer services function and have heard that this new area is indeed something worth looking into further.

How can monitoring social media help you make decisions and deal with problems and opportunities?

Our client are diverse and they enjoy various benefits from different angles within their companies. Everything from new-product-introduction & tracking, or competitor pricing, to issue containment. Sometimes in fact for reasons of confidentiality, we don't get to hear what companies use our reports for: we just report objectively on what is driving "buzz" in social media spaces, like on forums and twitter.

One question we get though is how can information in social media be used to make conclusions about the wider consumer population?

Well speaking mathematically, we cannot make inferences and create actual statistics to the general population - yet. The day may come in the near future though, when the numbers of consumers engaging in discussion will be so high that we can draw inferences such as intent-to-purchase or brand awareness, and put some hard numbers behind this. Even then it will most likely be from a definable cross section of societies: age and education related, and we will have continued challenges in placing demographics to often consumers who prefer to have a discreet or anonymysed profile.

For now though we report on the qualities we find, and we use descriptive statistics within the domain of social media to illustrate the relative prominence these qualitative observations. This includes the relative prevalence of brand names, consumer opinions and for instance problems with newly launched products. However, even a very low number of "hits" within the latter, for example, can reveal invaluable insight into potential challenges in production lines or further back in the supply chain which are creating problems not detected earlier in the testing and launch programme.

This qualitative approach has been of particular value in tracking new mobile devices launched on the market, which have a plethora of features and diverse internal software. However, this is equally valuable in tracking a new service, or immaterial product from a financial institution, energy company, or a mobile network operator.

Within the world of gadgets- consumer electronics like mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or digital cameras - it is in fact often the lead consumers who are the real experts: we follow many of these as they try and buy diverse gadgets and report their experiences on the web. These lead influencers are very informed on how the technical features, like processor, touch screen, and GUI actually deliver benefits in use and how much better this performance is to earlier products or competitors offerings.

- Worth listening to?