ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to describe that it is worth starting with a reminder that social media can be used as a medium for distributing and collecting market research. It considers that to be predominantly content for a book on market research and not social media marketing. The monitoring of social media in order to gather data which will add to the stock of marketing intelligence will, ultimately, help make the product, brand or organization more competitive in the marketplace. Dubbed as netnography in an early study by Kozinets the online version of this social science is practised by joining online social media sites and entering into community discussion. According to research by Demand Metric nearly two-thirds of organizations in North America have adopted social media analytics tools of some kind. A footnote to this chapter is to remind readers that social media monitoring means that all elements of social media are there to be monitored.
