Which business intelligence gathering method is used to monitor online communities for public opinions?

Reporting tools are primarily used for generating summaries and visualizations of data, typically after the data has been collected and analyzed. While they can present information about public opinions, they do not specifically gather insights from online communities, making them less effective for monitoring ongoing discussions or sentiments.

Benchmarking is a method used to compare business processes and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other companies. It does not focus on gathering public opinions from online communities but rather on evaluating performance against standards, which makes it irrelevant to the task of monitoring social sentiment.

Text analytics involves processing and analyzing text data to extract meaningful insights and patterns. While it can analyze opinions expressed in text, it is a broader category that does not specifically target social media or online communities. Therefore, it is not the most direct method for monitoring public opinions in those contexts.