Social media provide a wealth of data for marketers

Jonathan Spier, chief executive officer of NetBase Inc., a social media analytics company, had the chance to win multimillion-dollar contracts for his 25-person firm if he could answer one question: Why do men sport stubble? The query, posed by a consumer product company to more than 100 firms, had to be answered by mining millions of postings by men on social media sites. NetBase's software, which reads and analyzes 50,000 sentences a minute, helped it seal the deal.
“The technology reads and understands every sentence of every document that we touch from billions of Web sources,” said Spier, whose Mountain View, Calif.-based company now employs 50 and works with Coca-Cola Co., Kraft Foods Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co.
“It's all oriented around what businesses need and want from information. That's our selling point.”

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