Infosociability: Monitoring and research on the web 2.0 for decision making

This methodology offers an approach to studying the information available within Web 2.0 Media and User-Generated Content (MUGC). The large-scale generation of online information is the result of collective social action based on information: infosociability. Competitive Intelligence (Cl) aims to monitor and research a company's web 2.0 environment for information relevant to its decision-making process. Facing the possibilities and limitations that today's technology offers for processing the communication of meanings and abstract ideas in text format, a methodology derived from empirical research on web 2.0 is proposed. Monitoring and research are identified as the two key processes that generate insights aimed to facilitate decision-making. The relevance of each stage is illustrated with reference to the diverse methodological challenges encountered while extracting and analyzing large amounts of online information.