Articles

September 2010

Twitter is now an essential resource for gathering competitor intelligence . In this article, we’ll provide a few hints to help integrate Twitter into your competitive information gathering process. These tactics will help cut through the noise to gain valuable insights on the competition.

Follow tweets with industry hashtags.

If you’re new to Twitter, one of the most useful basics is learning to use, search, and monitor hashtags. Tweets are categorized and sent to specific groups of users based on their hashtags (keywords or topics preceded by a pound symbol.) The first step in learning to follow relevant tweets is to discover the hashtags associated with your competitors and industry. Product names, company names, and industry terms are all possible hashtags. Create nicely formatted hashtag search lists in order to follow specific tweets using third-party tools for Twitter like TweetDeck. Once you configure the lists, all relevant tweets ...

August 2010

Competitive pricing research can be difficult when your competitors are B2B companies who don’t list prices for products and services on their websites. To help you complete this research with less effort, look into using the three resources listed below. They may help streamline your research process and uncover the pricing intelligence you’ve been looking for. 

GSA Advantage

If you haven’t heard of the GSA, it’s a federal agency with a program to establish contracts between commercial firms and the government. The contracts allow government agencies to procure products and services at specific pre-negotiated prices listed in the GSA Schedules. GSA Schedules list prices for multiple product and service configurations from your competitors so it provides an exponentially greater amount of data than a “regular” contract. Use the GSA Advantage site to search for current contracts featuring your competitor’s products. Go to the e-Library tab to access the GSA ...

August 2010

Facebook is a valuable resource for gaining insight about your competitors and market space. Though Facebook recently disabled its popular Facebook Lexicon analytic tool (in order to better optimize the tool for future use), there are still a multitude of opportunities to uncover competitive intelligence data. Here are a few of our favorite tips for competitor analysis using Facebook.

1. Join Facebook groups sponsored by competitors.

Not only will you gain access to official marketing communications from your competitor, but you will also be able to view the other members or “fans” of the company. Take time to see how these fans are interacting with the group and its official messaging. Are they commenting on the posts made by the company? Are they mostly silent? Frequent commentators are the ones to watch as they are likely influencing your competitors through the feedback and commentary they are posting. It is ...

August 2010

In this series, we will focus on uncovering competitor intelligence using LinkedIn, the most popular social media network for professionals.  Here are a few of our favorite tips for finding key information from the profile pages and interactions of individuals on LinkedIn.

Read Key Profiles

You will often find useful competitor intelligence in plain view on the profile pages of your competitor’s employees. In the position summary section for each job, employees routinely reveal special projects or skills that were developed for recent company initiatives. Sometimes you can even find information about contract values and departmental budget numbers. Depending on your objective, focus your search by checking the profiles of employees within specific divisions or job functions. LinkedIn’s advanced search features make this fairly simple. Don’t click away from the targeted profile without scrolling all the way to the end. Many people highlight significant accomplishments in the Awards ...

August 2010

As the most popular professionally-geared social media platform, it’s no surprise that LinkedIn provides a wealth of information about companies. In this series, we will highlight useful tactics for finding competitor intelligence using LinkedIn. These are a few of our favorite tips for using company profiles to obtain better information about your competition.

Analyze Employee Changes

On each company profile page, there is a section that displays recent employee changes. It includes the name, job title, and often a link to the individual profile of any employee who has recently changed his/her employment information. In some cases, the stats about each individual are of little value in terms of competitor intelligence-- but from a trending perspective, these actions (new hires, promotions, departures, etc.) can all signify trends happening within the operations of your competitor. Go to your competitor’s profile and click the Activity tab. This will display all recent ...

January 15, 2010

In the analytics wars, one of the quasi-metaphysical topics I try to avoid is debating the distinctions between “information,” “intelligence,” and “insight.”

That’s about as academic a dispute as you can imagine. It’s not as if we’re discussing the physical distinctions between, say, gases, liquids, and solids. There is no magical phase-change where information--extracted from databases and contextualized into reports and graphs-- becomes the precious gem “intelligence” and catalyzes some alchemical reaction to produce “insight.” And let’s not even go into the corollary debate regarding what makes some insights more “actionable” than others.

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January 13, 2010

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted the key predictions that herald long-term changes in approach for IT organizations and the people they serve for 2010 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions for 2010 showcase the trends and events that will change the nature of business today and beyond.

These predictions were selected from across Gartner’s research areas as the most compelling and critical predictions. The trends and topics they address this year speak to the changing balance of power and focus in IT. Gartner analysts said last year's themes of shifting ownership and revenue flows continue, becoming more pronounced and more sharply focused. As the macro-economic environment adjusts to a new balance between supply, consumer demand and regulation, the focus of this year's top predictions has expanded to encompass shifts in the way that users interact with IT.

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