There are many tools online readily available that can be easily utilized for competitive intelligence gathering. Social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook offer a plethora of information that your competitors work with and what they are up too. Not only can you find information about your competitors, but they can also find valuable information about you.
Let’s begin with an example from LinkedIn. You work in the online floral business and you deliver flowers across North America. You can assume the online floral company works with a multitude of distributors and service providers. There are marketing, technology and sales contacts to name a few.
Many of these marketing, technology and sales contacts will be connected with employees of this floral company through LinkedIn in hopes of also expanding their networks. In this scenario, we will call the online floral business OnlineFlowerExpress4U.com. Employees from this company will undoubtedly be on social networking sites and through their profiles will have many of their connections viewable and publicly searchable. A competitor, say from GreatFlowers.com could easily search executives and marketing employees connections from OnlineFlowerExpress4U.com…all for free and within minutes.
By searching through this information, someone from GreatFlowers.com could find out information on how OnlineFlowerExpress4U.com markets their products online. Not only that, but if any of OnlineFlowerExpress4U.com’s technical or marketing services are outsourced, say their search marketing efforts, this could be used to GreatFlowers.com’s advantage. Using this search marketing example, someone from GreatFlowers.com could contact the search firm that OnlineFlowersExpress4U.com uses. If a chatty sales person picked up, they would be getting even more valuable information about their competitors. Further to this there are techniques that can be used to get a sales person on the other line to be overly talkative!
Through Facebook, someone from OnlineFlowerExpress4U.com could also be connected to someone from GreatFlowers.com. Depending on the privacy settings, someone from GreatFlowers could get even more information about employees from OnlineFlowerExpress4U.com and their connections. They could search through Facebook and find comments on pictures and keep tabs on new friends that are added by their competitors (which by default appear on the newsfeed within Facebook). If someone is smart and keeps tabs on who adds friends (and not many people turn down friend requests from colleagues), they could monitor the activity of recently added competitors. This is a potential source of very valuable information.
On top of this, there are programs such as Hitwise that have upstream and downstream reports. These reports are very useful to see where competitors are getting or churning their traffic to. Additionally, there are companies like Email Analyst that offer great services to track the emails that your competitors and their distributors/publishers are sending. You can also attend trade shows and industry events for networking purposes.
My personal favorite is going to a competitor’s website under their hiring section or doing a search on Monster.com for a specific competitor. It is shocking to see what kind of information is put out in job descriptions and job titles for organizations that are hiring. A great example of this can be found in an article that appeared in Biz Report called “Amazon goes from Books to Booze”. Jonathan Birchall of The Financial Times who broke the story noticed that Amazon had a job listing for a Senior Wine Buyer. Who knows if this is truly where Amazon is going, but it can be inferred that they are, as Birchall points out that “The wine sales will augment a rapidly expanding non-perishable groceries business that Amazon launched two years ago”. That’s is how it works, you connect the pieces!
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