In modern society business is moving at an ever accelerating pace, where product cycles are measured in months and not years. With the rapid change and an increased competitive business landscape there are plenty of reasons to keep an eye on the competition.
Competitive intelligence get smart with the internet
1. COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
GET SMART WITH THE
INTERNET
For additional information about Competitive Intelligence
please visit www.Intelligence2act.com
2. www.Intelligence2act.com
In modern society business is moving at an ever accelerating pace,
where product cycles are measured in months and not years.
With the rapid change and an increased competitive business landscape
there are plenty of reasons to keep an eye on the competition.
Gaining competitive intelligence (CI) is less about corporate espionage
or spies, and more about getting the information form public sources;
the internet just happens to be available for everyone. The net offers a
wide variety of sources for your CI needs and can make corroborating a
rumor as easy as tapping a finger. Keeping an eye on your competitors
social media, having alerts for news stories, and spending some time in
the forums will give you more information than you can handle.
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The best source of CI is still the ex-employee, and by using the net you
can easily find their resume (with full contact details), or talk to them
through a forum discussion.
Reaching out to these individuals will give you a couple more pieces to
the puzzle but there are numerous other sources online. Using the
current and past job postings that a company puts online can give you
an idea of their business strategy moving forward or their struggles to
keep people in certain positions.
Just a simple search can yield several reports by industry trade or
research groups that specifically studied your competitors and
therefore cut your competitive intelligence work in half.
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Most people that gather CI tend to value human sources, what they tell
you directly, over what they find on the net or in reports.
Tracking the stars at your competitors using LinkedIn or conference
websites can be valuable, especially when they leave your competitor
for a particular reason.
Developing a relationship with these people can also help down the
road where you may be in a position to hire them away from your
competitors. Having your team review all of the available information
on the people at the competition, at all levels, will help to give you the
best idea of what the culture is like, so that you can infer certain things
about future behavior.
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Using the internet to gather competitive intelligence is getting easier
every day and if you are not already using it you should start right away.
A simple search in Google can yield an immense amount of public
information that you can use to form the framework of your CI but it is
important to corroborate all of your information, preferably with direct
human sources.
With more public records moving online almost all of the CI can be
gathered through the internet and the information is only going to
increase.
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