92 Kellogg Insight Jennifer Cutler, an associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, thinks it may be time to send many surveys into a well-deserved retire - ment. Instead, she and a coauthor have developed a real-time brand-per - ception measurement tool based on Twitter activity. Cutler and coauthor Aron Culotta of the Illinois Institute of Technology have created an approach that allows marketers to track in real time how their company compares to others for any attribute that interests them: in minutes, a marketer can know, for example, whether customers see Tesla as more or less luxurious than Porsche, a task that previously might have taken weeks or even months to complete. This is accomplished not by tracking what users are posting to Twitter, but rather whom they follow—an approach Cutler believes offers deeper and more nuanced insights into how companies are viewed. It’s an approach that can also be used to track emerging trends or the latest hashtags. “There’s a lot of excitement in the field of marketing about the poten - tial to extract insights about consumers from these data, but there’s definitely been a struggle to figure out how to do that,” Cutler explains. Thus, much of those data remain untapped by marketers. Thanks to research like hers, however, “a lot of the barriers to entry and a lot of the obstacles to applying large-scale data mining for marketing insights are falling down.” The Power of Social-Media Data Mining When marketers look to social media, they are often focused on what Based on research from Jennifer Cutler