Steve King has a nice post on how businesses can use social media as an easy, cheap way of doing market research.

We’re not talking here about quantitative research: if you want to know what the market thinks of your product, you really need a market research firm to do it, using well-designed questionnaires and proper sampling techniques. But if you’re looking for ideas, leads and even solutions to problems, then social media can be a very useful way of getting results. One marketing director held a competition asking Twitter users to define innovation in 140 characters or less; an economist posed a question on LinkedIn that received 1000 answers. (Caveat: King doesn’t say whether they were good answers.)

The beauty of the approach is that costs so little you have almost nothing to lose: at worst, you won’t get anything useful; at best, you’ll have engaged with your customers and learned something that could add genuine value to your business.