Using Social Media for Competitive Intelligence
Social Media has gradually gained importance as a customer monitoring tool. But companies are also using social media to gather clues about their competitors and how they're perceived in the marketplace. Such information can be critical for any strategy based upon the weakness of competitors. For instance, a pattern of customer complaints about a competitor's product or service offers the opportunity to provide an alternative solution. And keeping an eye out for conversations that relate to industry trends will allow a company to stay ahead of the market curve?. So while social media is great for listening, it is also an important resource for gauging market opportunities. Well-known social media websites include:
Did online intelligence really exist before LinkedIn? Competitive Intelligence professionals can search the site's Companies Tool linkedin.com/companies - to learn about a company's new hires, recent promotions, and former employees. Indeed, employee data from LinkedIn can be combined with phone research in order to recreate the organizational employee chart of a competitor. Assembled as such, an astute observer can determine whether a competitor's department is expanding, in the midst of a shakeup, or if there is an emerging thread of expertise among new hires. In similar fashion, LinkedIn users may be able to identify a company's corporate clients, organizational divisions, recent acquisitions, and even possible strategic alliances.
Twitter is not only useful for finding out what a competitor is thinking (and who they tend to listen to) but also what customers think of their product/service. Better yet, Twitter users can monitor 'tweets' (twitter user comments) in real time. Ken Sickles of LetsTalkKnowledge blog suggests using tweetdeck to follow twitter: their column layout makes it far easier to follow tweets about a competitor's executives/employees, companies, and/or products (having a column for each). If desired, another column can be reserved for a particular search keyword (Ken suggests using the @ symbol for example @jpotter- to see what people are saying about a person). TweetDeck also provides several analytical tools as well. For instance, their cloud button creates a cloud tag for a particular column. And their apps filter tag can be used to filter a column's comments (much like a refining a search from current comments). At tweetbeep.com a user can create an alert that will notify them whenever a competitor?s twitter page changes.
Facebook can provide observers insight into competitor's marketing message. In particular, a Facebook user can understand how a competitor's fans interact/influence the company. What product/customer support issues repeatedly come up for discussion? How do customers respond to particular product ads? What industry rumors are being floated? Employees may even reveal product development specifics. Following/creating neutral industry groups on Facebook allows observers to more carefully listen to customers, build relationships, and discern under-the-radar industry developments as well.
Google Insights at google.com/insights/search is especially helpful to determine what people are searching/thinking about (and what trends therein lie) with regard to regional location. Rising Searches allow the user to view the fastest rising searches for a particular point in time. Finally, Google?s Domestic Trends tool- google.com/finance/domestic_trends- allows a searcher to compare any search querie to stock prices overtime. And of course, Google Alert- google.com/alert- can be used to daily/weekly monitor websites and blogs using a particular industry/company/product keyword. Google?s Group Search tool - groups.google.com - can be used to track discussion in both Google groups and non-groups. In contrast, Yahoo Groups only offers the capability to search group descriptions. Other websites such as Glassdoor.com and Vault.com are configured to determine what company employees might be saying online.
Blogs
Like twitter, blogs provide some insight about opinion regarding a particular topic. technorati.com is especially useful when seeking blogs with some ?authority? about a particular topic. In contrast, blogsearch.google.com uses Google?s relevance ranking algorithms to retrieve relevant topical blogs. Less well known is that Google?s Blogsearch allows online searchers to find blogs by author, title word, and/or blog post word. Finally, blogpost.com is an excellent resource when seeking to determine trends or track discussions.
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