Geographical boundaries were broken with the advent of the internet. Every social activity has online manifestations. They generate more traffic to interesting and current issues and receive enormous responses from people of different walks of life. The advancement of networking technologies has helped appreciate information value by providing equal rights to all those who wish to use and enhance its value more.

Pushing ahead the benefits of browsing are leading social networks that provide users the opportunity to comment, vote or discuss a topic. They provide tremendous opportunities for people, the world over to collaborate. They have enabled the user to lead discussions, conduct opinion polls and receive responses to their views and comments. While these sites have nurtured friendships and sourced information, they also provide the market analysts with a chance to conduct research and analyze responses to understand user, and in turn consumer behavior.

Today's leading industries and corporations have found the new power of investing in social networking sites that can improve or enhance business value. Harnessing the power of social networking can yield greater benefits by creating awareness on the product or subject. Analyzing collective contribution of users can help project citizen views, opinions and support for any particular group or event. Opinion polling can also help market researchers to understand whether responses are genuine or manipulated.

Online discussion networks have generated support for political parties, nurtured groups with similar passions making the analysis and research related tasks simpler. Opinion polls can be usefully analyzed to find out voter turnout ratio, support for an economic policy, opinions on pollution, health care and economic growth. It can also help gain insight into common interests that bind people from different nationalities.

Many leading social and business discussion networks have provided a free forum to users to openly address an issue and take a lead in discussing various aspects of it. Minekey, a leading online discussion network has generated more than a million opinions on 100,000 diverse topics ranging from food to fashion, politics to pop culture, environment to entertainment and many more. They also research on responses and provide age-wise and gender-wise metrics. The most surprising discovery from Minekey, recently, revealed that 82% of its users, from various countries, also preferred Barack Obama.

While the advantages of social networking can be beneficially used for market research and analysis, the detrimental factors also need to be considered. Users and analysts need to be on the lookout for spam, viruses and exploitation of providing useful responses. Making the best use of these online discussion forums can not only unite ideas and nurture budding friendships; they can also provide a strong base to derive precise metrics and have healthy online discussions.