Social media analytics and new product development

Abstract

Social Media, due to its ubiquitous nature, has permeated into the daily lives of the customers of the organizations. The existing and prospective customers are increasingly engaged with the organizations through a two-way communication channel, which is almost always available to them. Through these engagements, an enormous level of data (big data) is being generated on social media platforms. However, this data, generated on social media platforms, is highly unstructured in nature that needs to be organized before suitable inferences can be drawn to facilitate the decision making by the organizations. This data is analyzed through social media analytics to understand the experiences, expectations, user behaviors, among others to improvise or innovate the existing product/service portfolio or to develop new products. This paper has attempted to understand the impact of social media analytics on the effectiveness of new product development activities and has also tried to emphasize the need for analyzing the data being generated on social media for enhancing the new product development process.