Bill Rice Internet Marketing > Competitive Intelligence

10 Reasons You Need Competitive Intelligence Now

April 13, 2010 By

ci-collage.jpgCompetitive intelligence seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Is it because of the increasingly open and social Web? The vast proliferation of social networks? Or, the the dawn of social media monitoring. Regardless of the source of the surge, it is important to your business and it is easier than ever.

Why do you need to tune-up your competitive intelligence capabilities?

1. Social media makes it easy - It has never been easier to plug into the market. Social media makes listening and engaging with customers, partners, and even competitors easier than ever. If you are not participating, or at least monitoring social media, you are creating a big missed opportunity in your marketing plan. Your customer expect you to be here. And there is tons of good strategic and tactical information flying around to give you the competitive advantage.

2. The Web is social, markets are conversations - There is little doubt about the Web becoming more social. Everyone is connecting. These connections create communities and market niches online. This means your markets are literally conversations online. Are you tapped into the online market?

3. Why wouldn’t you want to listen to customers? - If you asked any marketer if she would like to be a fly on the wall, watching customers experience her product first hand, you would get an enthusiastic, “Yes!” Yet, daily we miss this opportunity by turning a deaf ear to social media.

4. Why wouldn’t you want to listen to your competitors customers? - Even better, how about watching potential customers experiencing the competitors’ product or service. That is the opportunity of competitive intelligence using social media monitoring.

5. Your competitors are listening to your customers - Guess what? If your competitors are really good and really want to beat you–they are already listening to your customers. That means they have a competitive advantage, right now!

6. Your competitors are listening to you - Whether you want to admit it or not, you are leaking strategic and tactical insight into your next business move. It’s hard to prevent that. Maybe you don’t even want to. But, you can assume your competitor is listening…so should you.

7. Your customers are looking for opportunities to steal your customers - Yes, this is an increasingly hostile business environment. It seems as though buying customers are finite. That means competitors are on the hunt. They are looking to identify and then steal your customers. Social media is an efficient way to do both. Shouldn’t you be doing this better than your competitor?

8. Your competitors customers may be frustrated - There are few things better than a customer frustrated with the competitor. They are not only ripe for the plucking, but if you help them they are likely to be loyal and passionate fans. Competitive intelligence and monitoring social networks will help you pinpoint these opportunities.

9. Your competitors customers may be willing to try something else - Like the frustrated customer, curiosity is nearly as good. If someone is shopping around for alternatives you need to make sure you are in the mix. A good competitive intelligence strategy will help you identify not only one off occurrences, but patterns to find large groups of them.

10. Your competitors may not be using social media monitoring at all - Perhaps the most interesting and compelling reason to start using competitive intelligence and social media monitoring now is that your competitor might not be. What a powerful competitive advantage if you can get the jump on them.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, monitoring, Social Media, social Web

How to Use Social Media for Competitive Intelligence

March 30, 2010 By

ci-collage.jpgCompetitive intelligence is first and foremost about understanding your competitor’s strategy. To do this you need to gain insight into their products, services, finances, partners, and customers. In today’s increasingly open and social Web, there are few better places to gather all of this important data than from social media.

1. Identify Promising Social Networks - Although there is some increasing stability in the landscape of social networks. Communities and demographics are still shifting in some of the most popular social media venues. Your challenge is to continually survey and make sure you are tuned into the most appropriate social networks for your objective.

2. Create Social Media Profiles - Although much of competitive intelligence is about having good listening capabilities, it is important to gain credibility in environments you monitor. This step means creating and maturing effective social media profiles. This does not necessarily have to be you specifically, but relevant personas need to be manned by someone (or increasingly acceptable–a group) in your business.

3. Aggregate Social Media - Once you have social network targets and persons to engage with you need to turn on the fire hose. In online circles, this is often referred to as a “river.” This is most often a flow of messages from blogging and micro-blogging (Twitter) platforms in the form of RSS feeds. This simple technology, combined with something like Google Reader can literally flow in thousands of social media conversations from all corners of the Web.

4. Track Important People (Influencers) - As you can imagine this approach will fill you with tons of noise and irrelevant messages. However, if you start to recognize the most influential and relevant people to your objectives you can begin to focus and prune your social media monitoring–bringing you better competitive intelligence.

5. Continually Tune Your Competitive Intelligence - Once you have a bead on your objective you need to constantly tune things. What are the best sources of information? Who tends to break news first? Are their people and websites that do the best analysis? Are there insiders that tend to leak information? May there are even websites that are already doing a good job aggregating social media–saving you a step or two.

Building an effective competitive intelligence monitoring system takes time and effort. You need to constantly observe where competitors and their communities are communicating. Social media and social networks are in constant fluctuation. This is an evolving ecosystem.

Social media opens up many of the critic communications that are important to answering your competitive questions. However, there is significant work in keeping your listening posts dialed into a moving target. A more comprehensive and dedicated social media monitoring platform can help you stay plugged-in on your competitor.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, monitoring, Social Media

5 Ways to Use FriendFeed to Monitor Your Competitor

March 16, 2010 By

friendfeed.pngFriendFeed is an excellent way to use your “friends” content aggregators as filters for your own social media monitoring. FriendFeed is a web-based a personal aggregator of all of your online content. You can have nearly any social media content or profile you publish to pumped into FriendFeed.

At first, that sort of tool seems of little use. Why would you want to aggregate your own content, after all you produced it. And, chances are you are trying to syndicate it, not aggregate this great stuff.

Actually, the real magic of FriendFeed is when you use all of your friends aggregations to filter in great stuff that is far more relevant and broad than a general search on Google or watching your Twitter feed. This filtration system can also be used competitively.

Here are some tips to tune this great tool on filtering out content about competitors.

1. Search for Keywords - Begin your competitive intelligence project by doing some keyword searches relevant to your competitive landscape–competitor names, products, and services.

2. Save Searches - Once you have found the right combinations of keywords that are revealing valuable information, FriendFeed allows you to save these searches for ongoing monitoring and analysis.

3. Subscribe to Key People - Also embedded in these search streams are key people. These people are likely to be competitors’ employees, executives, analyst, or influential players in your competitive landscape. These people, and their content, are certain to be excellent intelligence sources.

4. Create Lists - Once you have a focused set of competitive intelligence sources it is time to categorize them. FriendFeed again works well here by allowing you to create Lists. These lists will aggregate this competitive content–feeding you regular insights into your competitors.

5. Find Important Networks - Once you have important and insightful people you will start to see other patterns. Most important of those patterns are who is connected to whom. These are networks of influencers and business partners. Identifying and monitoring these networks can be very valuable to your competitive intelligence analysis.

FriendFeed is about people sharing content and connecting to those they find valuable. This is one of the most powerful features of social networks and FriendFeed turns these valuable networks of people into steady flows of content and information.

FriendFeed is a great way to efficiently bring in sources of information and intelligence. Tuning this flow to observe those most influential in your industry or those with access to important competitive information can give you the competitive advantage.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, friendfeed, monitoring, Social Media

Competitive Intelligence 2.0, The Social Media Monitoring Advantage

February 23, 2010 By

Competitive Intelligence 2.0Competitive intelligence 2.0 is just the latest benefactor of Web 2.0 technology. As with other genres tagging on the 2.0 moniker competitive intelligence is getting a face-lift because of this open and interoperable tech philosophy. Your opportunity is to take advantage of the advantage before your competitor does.

Competitive Intelligence is Business

There is really few things more fundamental to business than competition. That means that watching your competitor needs to be a core competency. Why then do so many folks neglect this critical skill?

That is an opportunity.

Competitive intelligence and social media monitoring is becoming a notable advantage in an increasingly online business environment. Surprisingly few are doing it yet, but there are thousands of important observations and opportunities flying around in these social streams and conversations.

Spying on Competitors is Hard

Getting relevant insight into your competitors strategy used to be very difficult, especially if you wanted to keep it legal. Most of the strategy took place in board rooms, behind closed doors, and were documented in physically routed memorandums.

Simply trying to get glimpses of these closed sessions meant a lot of money and creating direct relationships with tight-lipped insiders. That is changing. Web 2.0 is shifting more than business, it is shifting how we develop strategy.

It is also shifting how we collect this critical intelligence. What used to take hours in the library, hundreds of dollars worth of periodical subscriptions, expensive media clipping services, and big expense accounts in being reduced to bits and bytes online.

Social Media Makes Competitive Intelligence Easier

One of those major shifts is a migration to social networks as advisors and social media as workspaces. That means that those little bits of strategy that used to be tucked away safely in private memos are now flying around on the Web. That means you challenge is simply to grab them, aggregate them, analyze them, report on them, and use them to your competitive advantage.

Social media has changes how we do competitive intelligence.

Like most technology innovations, social media has dramatically improved the capability and the efficiency of competitive intelligence. What used to take a library full of resources, complicated intelligence trade craft, and clever analyst has now been reduced mostly to software.

Competitive Intelligence 2.0 is best defined as social media monitoring. Web 2.0 is making this critical component of business strategy simpler than ever. Are your getting your competitive advantage?

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, monitor, Social Media

Social Media Monitoring, Tracking Investor Sentiment on Twitter

February 9, 2010 By

stocktwits.pngInvestor sentiment is a big deal to publicly traded companies. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to know what your investors are thinking by simply watching the ticker. Social media and social networking can be a great way to monitor this very important measure of investor relations.

Financial Blogs

Blogs are now the old guys on the block. Easy to set-up and simple to publish to, these platforms are potentially as powerful as any other financial publisher. Their combination of experts and reach make them a great source of information on how the market perceives your company.

Blogs tend to be more candid and emotional about their stock picks and reviews–probably far more representative of the general market. Financial blogs are also often written by active investors, which gives you lots of mini-samples of investor attitudes and beliefs about your stock.

However, possibly the most important advantage to financial blogs is the easy and efficiency ways to aggregate and analyze them via RSS.

Investor Forums and Websites

Investor forums are legendary sources of hot tips and early trends. They are often the haunts of insiders, day-traders, and hedge funds–people hungry for any tiny edge. Unfortunately, they are very difficult to analyze or even monitor as an outsider. Often these forums are more a tool than a resource. Traders form tight communities of information networks and simple use the “right forum” to communicate. That means to the average outsider most of what you see is the noise, rarely spotting the real value in these communities.

Although it’s occasionally interesting to peek into these venues you are probably unlikely to grab any real read on your company’s investors.

Twitter

Twitter is fast becoming the new communication super-highway of many niches and markets. The investor community is an early adopter of this format. Operating much like instant messaging with a party-line twist you can do a variety of valuable things as an active investor.

  • You can listen for tips
  • You can test theories, and get reaction
  • You can drive up ad down sentiment
  • You can look for insiders
  • You can track movement

Twitter is a great resource for investors trying to find and ride emotional waves. Investors have already figured that out and are big users of this technology.

StockTwits

Of course, Twitter brings an enormous amount of noise with its value too. Fortunately, a little start-up called StockTwits has significantly assisted in filtering this noise. Using some simple syntax and aggregation this website and software tool combination is probably one of the best ways to get usable investor relations data to and from active investors, analyst, and financial journalist on Twitter.

Social media and the tools built around these powerful social networks can give your investor relations department a big advantage, assuming you have the ability to efficiently collect and analyze all the cues the open Web feeds you. Social media monitoring is critical to you investor relations team.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, investor relations, Social Media, twitter

Simple Competitive Intelligence Using RSS Feeds

January 7, 2010 By

rss-reader.pngCompetitive intelligence is an increasingly critical skill. The economy has certainly made the business environment more competitive. However, the increasingly open and social Web is an even bigger factor. And the biggest venue is social media.

Companies (your competitors) are leaking more information than ever into social media channels. Snooping on these dropped hints and disclosures can give you a big strategic advantage.

RSS for Competitive Intelligence

One of my favorite ways to efficiently collect competitive intelligence is with RSS feeds. This is one of the most powerful tools a sales person or dedicated competitive intelligence analyst can learn.

Originally, RSS was created to efficiently syndicate content around the Web–literally allowing content to move. However, it can also be used to make intelligence move to you. RSS is a great way to collect information from websites, blogs, and social media streams.

RSS is Anonymous

One of the biggest advantages of RSS for intelligence collections is that it is anonymous. Unlike subscribing to a competitors email newsletter, you can subscribe to RSS without leaving a trace.

What’s more, these anonymous RSS feeds are increasingly available on a variety of source of information. They are automatically created on most corporate blogs, websites, and investor relations sites. However, even more valuable they are available on social networking sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn. They can even be created on custom searches at Google, Twitter, and other popular search engines.

Discover Niches

Now that you know what RSS is and how powerful it can be for competitive analysis, let’s find some good sources of intelligence. Again, social media and the social Web is a big help here. Many industry insiders are increasingly blogging or joining niche social networks. One you find a few of these industry gurus you can tap into the niche.

Some of the best places to look for industry communities, include: Industry expert blogrolls, LinkedIn groups, Ning.com communities, and Twitter Lists. Each of these venues use RSS. So once you find the community–grab the RSS feed.

Aggregate RSS Feeds

The final step in really using RSS feeds for competitive intelligence is to aggregate them into an RSS reader or aggregator. There are a number of free and paid RSS tools on the market, depending on your sophistication. To start with you should find something simple. It should allow you to easily add RSS feeds, group common feeds, and probably email or otherwise report out key findings.

RSS is a powerful technology for anyone competing in business to understand. However, if your primary role is marketing, sales, or corporate strategic find yourself a favorite RSS reader and start listening in on all the “loose lips” on the Web.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence Tagged With: Competitive Intelligence, rss, Social Selling
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