Marketers Wake Up: Get Active in "Passive" online marketing

In a previous post but also in a paper co-authored by my colleagues Carlota Romero Lorenzo, Miguel Angel Boria and myself we describe the ways marketers can engage the Social Media as marketing tools. One of the methods we proposed we called the "Passive way" i.e. using the Social Media as source of market information and intelligence. By "listening" the talk in the Social Media Marketers can find out what customers tell about their brands, products and competitors online, find out how social is their brand and in general listen to the customer voice in real time. This will provide them at no cost excellent quality and fast information that properly utilized will help them optimize products, get new ideas for innovation, find about new needs and prevent publicity disasters. A new study by Professor Lakshman Krishnamurthi of the Kellogg School and his colleagues Gopinath and Thomas found that there is a relationship between online customer voice and firm sales. Good work, one more argument to pursuate marketers to look seriously to the online information goldmine. How can they do that efficiently? I am writing a new paper about this issue at the moment and most probably I will post a comment about this in the blog soon.