Either directly or indirectly, Twitter is loaded with market intelligence for your business. With an estimated 3 million current users who are voraciously talking about what makes them happy and what makes them angry - your products and your market segment are likely being discussed. Let’s take a walk through how this works.

Using Twitter search, we can quickly find mentions of our products or company in specific context.

Here we see an easy one (unfortunate for Qwest), but as Qwest we’d like to see who is talking about us. A quick check for “Qwest Sucks” brings up a litany of complaints about Qwest and its service. Many of these are very specific complaints that can be cross-checked, verified and used to improve service. It’s also an excellent measure of popular opinion about our company.

Mind you, opinion’s not always negative. Another search for “Qwest Rocks,” shows that sentiment about Qwest isn’t all negative.

Qwest customer services has indeed made some users happy. Qwest should be directly thanking these users for their patronage and letting them know they enjoy working with them.

For the less positive ones, Qwest should also respond and let them know they have been heard.
But we don’t need to be so specific. Suppose we are opening an Italian restaurant in Portland’s Pearl District. Maybe we want to know the buzz on other Italian restaurants in Portland and the Pearl District in general.

Here we see that there are a few tweets talking about Italian food in Portland and at least one pointing us to more detailed information in specific blog posts.

We can also look at the frequency of posts to tell us how hot Italian food might actually be in Portland and compare that to some other types of food.

We can also check on the Pearl District itself. Are people going to the Pearl District? Why are they going there? Is an Italian restaurant going to fit there?

We can see by the age and frequency of tweets that the Pearl District in general is more popular in Portland than Italian Restaurants.

Is Twitter going to be your only source of Market Data? Certainly not.

But Twitter is a great, free repository of general and honest conversation from which we can gather a wide range of information.

Jim Benson is a partner at Modus Cooperandi and blogs at Evolving Web. Jim is a management consultant who uses social media tools and principles to help his clients communicate.  Follow him on Twitter.