E-business intelligence

Indeed, you need to be intelligent to do business online. There is too much information out there, therefore, one needs to learn to listen. Market research is expensive, but cooperation and collaboration with stakeholders will bring you lots of valuable information you would have otherwise paid to someone else.

There are several useful web visitor tracking devices (or CRM integrations) out there. Here are 2 examples:
Google Analytics (most of it free to use)
With the help of Google Analytics you can measure your sales and conversions, get fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they have arrived  on your site and how you can keep them coming back.
Woopra (not free, they ask for a monthly fee)
Woopra builds a comprehensive, real-time profile and timeline for every user, tracking them from anonymous visitor to converted unique customer across multiple devices. 

If you want to know that has been said about your company, then the following sites should be visited:
Radian 6
Radian6 was bought over by Salesforce in 2011. Radian6 helps companies follow what people are saying about them online. Radian6 gathers the discussions happening online (blogs, comments, multimedia, forums, communities like Twitter, etc) and gives companies the ability to analyze, manage, track and report on their social media monitoring and engagement efforts.
Socialmention
Real-time social  media search and analysis. Like with Google Alerts you can receive social media alerts of your brand, company, marketing campaign or what not.


An acronym one needs to know:
SOA (Service-oriented architecture) can be seen as a continuum, from older concepts of distributed computing and modular programming, through SOA, and on to current practices of mashups, SaaS and cloud computing (which some see as the offspring of SOA)


PS. Pasi Tuominen (Haaga-Helia UAS) wrote his PhD on social media intelligence and reputation control.