Most businesses are rightfully concerned with providing their customers with the best possible product or service. For us at Newsdata.io news API, it certainly feels like a full-time job. However, no organization is an island. There is a larger world beyond the walls of any business. A market in which that business operates, and (I’m afraid to say) competitors who want to help your customers in similar but subtly different ways. A company that does not pay attention to its competitors will not last long. Indeed, there are numerous lessons to be drawn from this tragic tale of corporate demise. But there’s no denying that a failure to notice and respond to what was going on around them played a role. In short, the business failed to recognize the direction of the wind and (famously) underestimated the new kid on the block Netflix.

1. How to Use the Newsdata.io News API to
Boost Competitive Intelligence
Most businesses are rightfully concerned with providing their customers
with the best possible product or service. For us at Newsdata.io news API,
it certainly feels like a full-time job. However, no organization is an island.
There is a larger world beyond the walls of any business. A market in which
that business operates, and (I’m afraid to say) competitors who want to help
your customers in similar but subtly different ways.
A company that does not pay attention to its competitors will not last long.
Indeed, there are numerous lessons to be drawn from this tragic tale of
corporate demise. But there’s no denying that a failure to notice and

2. respond to what was going on around them played a role. In short, the
business failed to recognize the direction of the wind and (famously)
underestimated the new kid on the block Netflix.
They were lacking in competitive intelligence. And the rest, as they say, is
history. If you want to avoid the same fate, or if you want to help others
avoid it, keep reading.
What is competitive intelligence?
Most of us believe we understand our competitors and, as a result, the
concept of ‘competitive intelligence.’ In layman’s terms, it’s “ensuring we
know what a shortlist of our direct competitors are doing.” That is part of
the story, but it is not the whole picture.
To gain a better understanding of competitive intelligence, it is helpful to
first gain a better understanding of competition itself. While we often think
of our competitors as other businesses that sell similar products to us, this
isn’t entirely correct.
In fact, research from the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals
(SCIP) estimates that an unknown player currently outside the industry will
pose the greatest competitive threat to any given business 91% of the time.
Competition is better defined as follows on this basis:
“Any other way our customer can reap the benefits of our product or
service.”

3. To give just one example (of an infinite number), mobile games may be
viewed as a competitor to newspapers because they both help us pass the
time while waiting in line. When we consider competition in this light,
competitive intelligence expands to include:
• The activities and events involving our direct competitors
• Changes in market conditions, technology, and consumer behavior may
have an impact on our success, as well as news about emerging new
competitors that pose a threat to our current market position.
At this point, it should be clear that competitive intelligence is a broad field,
and staying on top of all potential sources of competition is difficult. Let us
now discuss how we might go about doing so.
Identifying meaningful competitive intelligence
If you are fortunate enough to have a small number of competitors, each
with a distinct name, competitive intelligence is simple. The majority of the
work will be done for you by Google News alerts.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, that is not the case in real life. In fact, every
company must be aware of constantly changing market characteristics, new
competitors, and more traditional competitive activity. It should be obvious
that this is not a job that can be adequately covered by standard alerts.
It is also not a task that a team of analysts, no matter how large or
dedicated, could reasonably be expected to perform, at least not without
outside assistance. Even for organizations that are in the business of selling

4. competitive intelligence platforms (many of which
are Bytesview customers), this is not a viable option.
Fortunately, such outside assistance is available in the form of thousands of
journalists, bloggers, reporters, and researchers who publish news and
opinions about business (and indeed the wider world) every day.
We will have competitive intelligence worthy of the name if we identify,
classify, and share the content relevant to our specific challenge within this
output — whether for our own business or for sharing with customers.
This is why the Newsdata.io News API was created. It allows organizations
to scan the horizon for relevant news content as it emerges and track the
evolution of topics as they unfold.
Newsdata.io, in particular, ensures that the right competitive intelligence
content is delivered to the right people in a timely and accurate manner. It
works like this, but any solution you want to implement should aim to do
something similar:
• Aggregate news data from thousands of sources worldwide and make it
available via a single news API to ensure that nothing of significance is
missed, including specialist publications and longtail sites, as well as
those in languages other than English, to ensure that competitive
intelligence is not limited solely to stories covered by mainstream media.
• Natural language processing should be performed on each article
ingested to add structure to unstructured content, making it
exponentially easier and more efficient to find the relevant news you’re

5. looking for. The Newsdata.io News API NLP features entity tagging for
over thousands of entities, from different categories and industries,
sentiment analysis at the entity and document levels, and extensive
metadata extraction.
• Clean, structured news data in JSON as an output that can be easily
delivered to wherever it is required, so that the competitive intelligence
your company (or client) requires is available to be consumed in feeds,
dashboards, or sites as needed.
Of course, in order for such a system to work, it must first understand what
the company (or client) is looking for. It is important to remember the broad
nature of the challenge here: when establishing the entities and categories
that you wish to monitor, do not focus solely on the obvious, but on the
larger context.
The right way to react to competitive intelligence
It is one thing to gather competitive intelligence. What to do with this
knowledge is a completely different story. A blog post like this cannot hope
to provide a comprehensive primer on how to navigate the competitive
landscape (if only it were that simple), but it is possible to share some
thoughts and recommendations, such as:
• Keep everything in context. It is easy to become obsessed with
competition. However, delivering a great product and keeping customers
satisfied remains the key to success. It is critical not to overreact to every
event, but rather to carefully assess its significance first — it may have
very little.

6. • Keep an eye out for ‘emerging risk.’ That said, it is especially important
to recognize and respond too slowly emerging trends that may not seem
significant today but can become an existential threat if left unchecked.
Understanding and identifying precisely what these threats may look like
requires imagination and creativity, which is, of course, part of the
challenge.
• Be open to new experiences. One of the lessons of the Blockbuster story
is that the company became so enamored with its way of doing things
that it became unable to change in response to a new set of
circumstances. Large organizations may find it difficult to avoid this
trap, but do everything possible to create an agile, responsive
organization. Alternatively, as independent entities within a larger
corporate structure, incubate new ways of doing things.
• Recognize the power of mutual forbearance.’ With due respect to Isaac
Newton, not every action necessitates an immediate and opposite
reaction. Consider where your organization succeeds and where it fails.
Defend the former vehemently, but be willing to give up markets (either
geographical or vertical) if it makes sense and puts you in a better overall
position.
• When you DO move, move quickly. It takes experience and judgment to
know when to respond. However, if you realize a response is required,
don’t put it off any longer. Ensure that your organization is set up to
make tactical decisions quickly and to communicate a new approach in
the same manner.
Reference
1. Newsdata.io
2. Bytesview.com

7. 3. https://aylien.com/blog/how-news-api-supercharges-competitive-
intelligence