How Important Is Internet Intelligence For Your Business?

By Jason Cronkhite on August 27, 2009 in Social Media Marketing

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Did you know that….

Only one in five companies (22%) have an internal strategy that ties data collection and analysis to business objectives.

– Econsultancy//Online Measurement & Strategy Report

There are 251,290,489 internet users in the USA, who account for 15% of the total internet users in the world.

– Nielsen//NetRatings via Internet World Stats, April 2009

221m internet users in the U.S spent an average of 19 hours and 42 minutes online during March 2008. [Source: Nielsen Online, April 2008]

– An average of 52 seconds was spent on each web page visited.

– The number of web pages viewed per person was 2,437.

Socially driven sites are growing at alarming rates :

Worldwide unique visitors (June, 2009). Source: comScore

Google Sites: 844 million
Microsoft Sites: 691 million
Yahoo! Sites: 581 million
Facebook: 340 million
Wikimedia Foundation sites: 303 million
AOL: 280 million
eBay: 233 million
CBS Interactive: 186 million
Amazon: 183 million
Ask Network: 174 million

“Time spent on social network sites is also expanding: Across the globe in 2008 activity in ‘Member Communities’ accounted for one in every 15 online minutes – now it accounts for one in every 11. In Brazil the average is one of every four minutes and in UK it’s one in every six minutes.” — source Nielsen Wire.

People are interacting and influencing each other as they always have. The difference with people talking about a restaurant they just went to or a movie they saw last night in everyday conversation offline is that they influence a small subset of people. When this same conversation happens in an open forum online, the same conversation has a vast reach and the capability to influence many, many people. Moreover, if the person is highly influential and states something profound about your product or service it could have amazing or damaging consequences.

In the emerging world of internet intelligence or sentiment analysis, businesses like never before will have the opportunity to garner significant amounts of data about customers and competitors. This is great for people in general because it will force the hands of companies to Raise The Bar and perform, pardon the pun AT&T.

As a business owner, think of using internet intelligence as you would a radar detector scaning the data on a massive beach and then digging for treasure. But, more importantly, you’ll have a much better idea of what you are digging for with the data in front of you.

Let’s say you are an author with a great book and you have a niche but large audience. Using the power of internet intelligence you have the capability to reach out and target the audience you are trying to reach quite efficiently.

So, the question is: what do you think about the opportunities for your business now using internet intelligence?