Bill Rice Internet Marketing > monitoring

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

5 Simple Steps to Turn Google Reader into a Social Media Monitoring Tool

April 6, 2010 By

rss-reader.pngSocial media monitoring is important to every company and brand. The social Web is creating both opportunities and risks to our businesses. Social media is growing in popularity and creating an enormous public relations impact with simple communication tools, like: blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and hundreds of others.

These simply mean your job as a PR specialist or corporate strategist is more critical than ever. Social media, given to viral-like behavior, could instantly make your brand a rock star or drag you into a PR crisis firestorm. The key to being in the best position on both is social media monitoring.

1. Start with a RSS Reader - The first step in any good social media monitoring campaign is to find a good intelligence collection tool. I prefer, as a starter tool, Google Reader. This is one of the most popular RSS feed aggregators and makes collecting known social media sources simple.

In most cases adding bits of social media information to your monitoring is as easy as clicking on the websites RSS link, button, or icon. This will then redirect you to a page asking your RSS reader type–select Google.

2. Subscribe to Industry Blogs - Now that you have your free social media monitoring software in place start looking for leading industry or competitor blogs. With the growing popularity of these informal publishing platform, nearly everyone has them.

These blogs are often oozing with leaks, tips, and prognostication. Also, look for clues to other related information sources (blogs) in the blogroll. This is where many bloggers list other websites and blogs they follow.

The neatest part of all is that you can subscribe to these RSS feeds for free and anonymously.

3. Subscribe to Key Searches - Websites and blogs are one thing, but if you want the latest scoop you should subscribe to RSS feeds on searches. I have found the most productive way to do this is by using Google News Search, Google Blog Search, and Twitter Search. Each of these will allow you to do your keywords search, view the results, and then if you like it subscribe via RSS. This will update your Google Reader with the latest results as they come in.

4. Actively Discover and Prune Your Feeds - As you begin subscribing to RSS feed you will quickly discover that without good analytical tools on top of this data it is quickly overwhelming. The best way to combat this without buying a more sophisticated social media monitoring tool is to constantly discover new (and better) sources and pruning the less productive ones.

5. Don’t Forget Reporting - One of the best things about Google Reader is you can quickly alert your team or management about emerging trends. I suggest using primarily the email feature, but you can also share within the Google Reader to push the information out through a social media channel like Twitter or Facebook.

The Google Reader can be a great first step in social media monitoring. Although it is very limited in discovering emerging sources and trends, it can give you the leg up on competitors. It’s other weakness is of course analysis and reporting, but again it can get you started.

The most important thing is to remember that social media is a great source of early warnings, trending opportunities and risks, and will keep you in the know. If your are monitoring social media actively you will rarely be surprised with a PR opportunity or crisis ever again.

Filed Under: Competitive Intelligence, Featured Tagged With: google reader, monitoring, rss, Social Media

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

Social Media Engagement Starts with Monitoring

March 23, 2010 By

tweetdeck.pngThere is lots of talk in marketing and PR circles about how important social media engagement is. The experts are telling us to get involved with our customers. Interact with customers. Engage customers for ideas and feedback. Participate with them as they experience your products and services.

That sounds good, but you are probably asking: How do I find them? Then how do I connect with them? And finally how do I speak their language?

All simple, logical, and often ignored questions. Interestingly enough they all have the same answer–social media monitoring. Do you have a plan to find and monitor your target?

Find Your Community

It is hard to have a conversation anywhere, online or offline, without having someone to talk to. Social media and social networks are full of people. But, randomly talking to people isn’t very interesting or rewarding. You need to find people like yourself or interested in your expertise.

Finding your community starts with monitoring various social networks (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) and finding out where your people hang-out.

Start Monitoring Social Networks

Tapping into and monitoring these networks can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Here are a few of the most popular:

1. Join the social network. Most social media website require you to join to listen in. And social media works best if you are participating, not just lurking, anyway.

2. Find a way to aggregate your social networks. Google (RSS) Reader, Browser bookmarks, Delicious, and FriendFeed are some of the popular ways I use to aggregate some of my favorite social websites and conversations. The king of social Web aggregation though is RSS. You should learn more if you want to really monitor social media well.

3. Use a professional social media monitoring tool. This is the most efficient way to pull in all the available social media venues and layers in good noise filtering and keyword monitoring.

Listening Makes Engaging Simple

Really the end-game in all of this monitoring is to make your engagement more effective. Regardless of whether you are selling something, learning something, or buying something listening first will make your engagement more effective.

Ultimately, your time online and in social media has some goal or objective. If you begin your strategy with a good monitoring plan you are going to be better prepared–smarter about your audience and the opportunity. Getting you to your objective faster and more efficiently.

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: facebook, linkedin, monitoring, Social Media, twitter, youtube

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

What is Social Media Monitoring? 5 Steps to Listening Efficiently.

March 2, 2010 By

eavesdropper.pngSocial media monitoring should be a top priority on any corporate strategic agenda. This medium of communicating and marketing is surging at an unprecedented rate. What’s more it can be overwhelming if you simply jump in without any filters.

This begs the frustrating question most corporate executive are pondering: What is social media monitoring and why do I need it?

1. Social Networking Platforms - The best place to start understanding how to listen into social media is to understand where all the conversations are coming from. Social networking platforms are simple web-based software tools that fundamentally do two very important things: connect related people and facilitate their communication.

This is the starting point of monitoring social media. You need to identify where your community or customers hang-out. Then you need to put your ear to those places.

2. Social Media Aggregation - Fortunately, for those in the listening business RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has already built the pipes to flow these conversations into a central location or dashboard. RSS a technology built originally to help syndicate blog content is now a default protocol for moving nearing any kind of content from place to place.

In monitoring social networks, RSS is the preferred way to aggregate these channels into software that can sort, analyze, and report.

3. Conversation Sorting - One of the biggest challenges in the social media environment is sorting the signal from the noise. This makes keyword monitoring and sorting a critical element to any social media listening strategy. Keywords are not only your trigger mechanism to identify interesting conversation, but it is also the sorting mechanism to make sense of them.

Using keywords and keyword clusters can make your monitoring much more productive.

4. Keyword Monitoring - Keywords are important elements to identify trigger events and sorting out value. Unfortunately, this is the language of search engines, but not aggregation strategies like RSS. Therefore, you need to do a little work to get this working. Simply aggregating a bunch of sites only amplifies the noise in your monitoring strategy.

The key to monitoring effectively and efficiently is aggregating only the streams and conversations triggered by your keywords.

5. Social Engagement and Reporting - All of this social networking and monitoring is for not if you can’t do something with it. That means engaging in or reporting on social media channels when opportunity or crises arises. Social media monitoring is not a strictly passive pursuit. Getting positive return out of your investment in monitoring comes with efficiently organizing your engagement strategy.

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