Deriving Competitive Intelligence from Social Media: Microblog Challenges and Opportunities

Marketing managers in many industries are seeking to provide their companies with new tools to detect market changes early and quickly enough to defend their competitive position. Social media has been recognized to be particularly relevant for both marketing strategies and competitive intelligence purposes since the information required to deal with competitive challenges has been recently relocated from published and proprietary sources to open social platforms. Among social media, microblog is one of the most convenient platforms since it is short, instantaneous, spontaneous and mobile and has become a great source of consumer opinions. Although there has been an increase in the number of companies developing a microblog presence, so far, very few academic research focused on microblog as a marketing intelligence tool. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is twofold: to provide a theoretical framework for microblog competitive intelligence, and to discuss its opportunities and limitations.