Competitive Intelligence

So, what is that competitor of yours up to these days?

Can’t afford electronic surveillance or hiring Mata Hari to pry the latest information out of the CEO or the head of R&D?

Fortunately for you there are several ways you perform a competitor analysis online. Here are a few ways to analyze your competition:

Search Google: By performing simple Boolean searches at Google you can find all kinds of free information on your competitors. Let’s say your competitor in in the competitive intelligence field as an example. You can first start with a simple search. Boolean logic allows you to more accurately manipulate the search.  Typical Boolean operators include the word AND (you can use + as well) and NOT (you can use – instead). You can read an example on how to use Boolean Logic and competitive intelligence on dating or employees.

You can click on each of these Google competitive intelligence searches below to see how the results change. I included the results results that I found, yours may be slightly different. Notice how the search results went from over 7M to about 3,000 found pages.

• competitive intelligence: Loose search – this finds sites that have both words on the site somewhere. It could produce a found page like, “This guy has no intelligence. And to make it worse he is very competitive.” About 7,410,000 results
• “competitive intelligence“: Refined search – this searches for the words competitive intelligence immediately next to each other. This typically assures a much more focused search engine result. About 836,000 results
• “competitive intelligence” +software: Refined search – this searches for the words competitive intelligence immediately next to each other AND the word “software” must be on the page. It could produce a found page like, “Competitive intelligence is important to monitor your competitors. There are many software programs to help you with the competitor analysis.” About 311,000 results
• “competitive intelligence software“: Refined search – this searches for the words “competitive intelligence software” immediately next to each other. This typically assures a much, much more focused search engine result. About 31,700 results
• “competitive intelligence software” +free -wikipedia.org: Refined search – this searches for the words “competitive intelligence software” immediately next to each other plus the word “free” somewhere on the page, but not a mention of wikipedia.org. About 2,950 results

Notice that how you refine your search more and more for permutations of competitive intelligence, that the search results get smaller.

Competitive Intelligence Tools

Competitive Intelligence Their Company:  Google Alert is a free tool keeps you updated on a daily, weekly or “as it happens” basis for your tracked keywords and phrases. Now that use understand Boolean search, you can enter your competitor’s name as a keyword (make sure to use quotes, + and – to enhance and refine your search results). Then every day, you will receive your free competitive intelligence email  containing new blog posts, Web sites, news stories, etc, on your nemesis.

Be sure to do the Google Alert on yourself, your company, your spouse, your stock, your…

Competitive Intelligence Their Web Site: You can use a free tool that monitors changes to web pages. ChangeDetection is  free to use and it is similar to Google Alert in that you will be contacted anytime there is a change on your competitor’s Web site. There have been enough bone-head mistakes when some IT guy uploads a product announcement before it should have been, then has to retract it. ChangeDetection can help you with those mistakes as well.

Competitive Intelligence Their Ego: Sometimes your competitor might say, “Hey, I am good and I am gonna’ tell you and everyone else!”  You can use social media software tools to catch those proclamations.

• HowSociable: HowSociable lets you monitor your competitor “over 100,000 brands measured using 32 different metrics.” Enter your competitor’s name into the search field and you’ll see a total visibility score as well as how the brand is performing in different categories. Categories include Twitter Tweets Score, Google Pages, YouTube and LinkedIn People Score . Enter your email address to get updates on the brand’s score and you’re done.
• SocialMention: SocialMention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

Competitive Intelligence Their SEO: You can use a service like Majestic SEO to monitor your competition’s link building efforts. Majestic claims to have mapped 6.5 trillion links. This competitive intelligence tool can alert you to who is linking to your competitor, when they should be linking to you.

This should keep you busy for an hour or two…

Have fun.