Business intelligence from user generated content : online opinion formation in purchasing decisions in high-tech markets

User Generated Content (UGC) requires new business intelligence methods to understand the influence of online opinion formation on customer purchasing decisions. We developed a conceptual model for deriving business intelligence from tweets, based on the Classical Model of Consensus Formation and the Theory of Planned Behaviour. We applied the model to the dynamic high-tech smartphone market by means of three case studies on the launch of new smartphones. By using Poisson regression, data- and sentiment-analysis on tweets we show how opinion leadership and real-life events effect the volume of online chatter and sentiments about the launch of new smartphones. Application of the model reveals businesses parameters that can be influenced to enhance competitiveness in dynamic high tech markets. Our conceptual model is suitable to be turned into a predictive model that takes the richness of tweets in online opinion formation into account