Social media listening for insights into niche markets (TM11)

Social media listening can help us access the tacit knowledge and vocabulary used by potential clients in niche markets to express their needs, desires, and circumstances. This session will briefly present case studies that explore how information professionals and entrepreneurs can glean meaningful insight into markets through social media listening techniques such as cluster analysis, deep listening, image quilts, and sentiment analysis. This will illustrate how free or low-cost techniques borrowed from netnography can be used to tap into the wealth of customer insight freely available on social media, while also hopefully enabling more inclusive, equitable, and impactful products and services to emerge and come to market.