Within the social media monitoring space, there is a lot of talk of using social media to innovate products and determine how trending data is pointing to new places that your customer wants products to go. But how realistic is it that a company can use this information appropriately?
Generally, I would say that most companies who do not generate massive amounts of social media on a day to day to basis are going to find social media as a source of product innovation pretty difficult. The real winners are companies like Subway or Taco Bell where there is enough flowing through Twitter streams, etc. to be able to quickly understand what consumers think about specific promotions and product releases. Entertainment companies who produce content may also have a high level of engagement, but production take a long time, and many of the companies who we have talked to don’t really see how they can react quick enough to make a change.
That being said, there is definitely an opportunity here for all companies with regards to product innovation. Just as it is great to bring in executive talent from outside the company to get renewed perspective, there is a huge benefit to bringing in the intuition of consumers who do not work at the company. As opposed to a market research study, the unstructured and often out-of-the-box thinking that comes out of a trend cloud can help researchers and product innovators within the organization think differently about how to to tweak ideas.
Are we still in the infancy of using this data for product innovation? Of course. But is there a lot of information out there that can be already be used to think differently? Absolutely.