In a commentary, SMU Assistant Professor of Information Systems (Practice) Shim Kyong Jin said that one of the most essential parts of running a business of any type is online consumer review. There is a lot of information freely and publicly available for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to better understand their customers, products, services, prospects as well as competitors. While there are paid services for social listening, SMEs can invest in a much more affordable alternative as a start. They will need a computer equipped with a free and open source Integrated Development Environment (IDE), open source programming language & interpreter, and a programmer with basic knowledge of a programming or scripting language. Computer programmes can plow through hundreds of thousands of social media posts to extract key insights critical to SMEs’ success. Social listening tools complement traditional Customer Relationship Management functions by enabling SMEs to proactively approach customers that are expected to experience difficulty with their products or services. Another application of social listening is identifying key influencers or advocates. Once SMEs have assessed the capability of social listening as a strong value-adding activity to their core business, they may want to scale this activity by increasing the frequency of data pulling and by increasing the amount of data extracted.