Quick, do you know where your customers are? They're online, of course. And they're talking about you.

So how do you go about measuring and analyzing this customer chatter?

Try "opinion mining." Never heard of it? Neither had I. A few enterprising business intelligence (BI) vendors have, though, and they're now making it possible for you to find out what your customers are thinking. Learn more in The Intelligence of Social Media–Part 1.

Need more intelligence? Learn about (among other things) the five requirements of a scalable data warehouse strategy, in Bye-bye to the Old BI: BI for Midsized Companies.

Oh, and one last thing before I head off for the weekend: TEC's principal analyst P.J. Jakovljevic weighs in on BigMachines, a provider of inventive configure, price, and quote (CPQ)/quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions. Get the dirt, in BigMachines: Getting Bigger and Better–Part 1.