Entering New Markets - Gathering Ground Level Information

One of the areas that we've been focused on in our International Business course has been the challenges that many companies have when they attempt to move into foreign markets, often assuming that knowledge from their home country will translate into the new market.

As companies send people forward into a country to start doing market research, this is a simple way to get very raw reactions to your concept. The beauty of this is that it's incredibly simple, incredibly inexpensive, and doesn't hide the human element behind a bunch of summarized numbers (or biases). This could be collected and frequently sent back to the product or strategy teams to give them data points to make adjustments to their original plans.

Twitter for Sales, Customer Service &/or Market Research?

Following up on the growing usage of Twitter, here's a good example of how customers are going to start using Twitter for things that relate to business and revenue...and not just their social status.

A few questions for companies:

1. If you have any sort of online presence (sales, product information, customer service, etc.), can you afford not to have a presence on Twitter? It costs nothing more than some time of people to monitor the Twitosphere. Most of this could be automated.
2. Wouldn't it be great to be able to monitor the preferences and dislikes of your competitors and customers? In real-time?
3. Wouldn't it be easy to let your customers and potential customers know about projects that you're working on, or recently released products, or a sale or coupons or discounts?

While it's not the exact science that we study in MBA courses, it does provide an excellent, real-time view of the crowdsource opinions and marketplace. I suggest that if you don't have a presence today, that you make it an action item for Monday.