Competitive Intelligence Thought Leaders – Bonnie Hohhof: B2B Market Research podcast

Sean Campbell
Authored bySean Campbell

Episode #96 of the B2B Market Research Podcast – Competitive Intelligence Thought Leaders – Bonnie Hohhof

We cover:

  • Possible reasons why SCIP vendors and organizations ignored social media for so long.
  • What topics are of interest to competitive intelligence professionals.
  • Why we should break down CI silos.
  • The changing face of competitive intelligence across a variety of job roles.

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Speakers:

Sean Campbell – CEO of Cascade Insights

Bonnie Hohhof, George Washington University

[Modified Transcript]

[Sean]:

Welcome to another episode of the Competitive Intel Podcast. In this podcast episode, we’re going to be interviewing Bonnie Hohhof from George Washington University.

This podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Cascade Insights specialize in competitive intelligence services for B2B technology companies. Our specialization helps us deliver detailed insights that generalist firms simply can’t match. Sign up for our newsletter for the latest CI information.

I want to introduce Bonnie Hohhof. Bonnie is currently teaching strategy at George Washington University. Perhaps most importantly, Bonnie is a 30-year veteran of the CI field with a lot of knowledge about how CI is practiced across a range of environments. Some of that, in large part, comes from the role that she had for a very long time with the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals Society, where she edited two major CI publications, and five CI books.

Bonnie has also received SCIP’s Fellow, Meritorious and Faye Brill awards for her contributions to the profession.  At the present time, Bonnie produces the Strategy and Competitive Intelligence newsletter on Scoop.it and she also has a cooperative competitive intelligence blog at DecisionIntelligence.org. Finally, her new book on competitive intelligence will be published this year. Needless to say, Bonnie is a very busy person, and she has done some great things for CI and that’s why we wanted to have her on the podcast. Bonnie, welcome to The Competitive Intel podcast.

[Bonnie]:

Thank you.

[Sean]:

Bonnie, I want to thank you for something. You, along with August Jackson, Claudia Clayton, and Mark Chussil were all really great to us when we started hanging out with the SCIP crowd in 2006 after selling our first company and we started Cascade Insights. I really appreciate all the support you have given us over the years.

Thanks for doing that. But in terms of my first question, you have two different websites. Tell us a little bit about each one. As I think there is a lot of value to be found on each one.

[Bonnie]:

If you go to Scoop.it you’ll find my competitive intelligence newsletter. It’s been up there for probably two years. I go through a whole bunch of different sources to identify things that are relevant to the production of competitive intelligence. Or, I focus on areas that people need to know about when they’re looking at understanding the particular needs of the people that they serve.

I highlight about eight to 12 different articles per day. Overall it’s a summary of articles that gives folks a feel for what’s going on, how things are changing, what people are talking about, and how they’re talking about it.

I try to focus attention on the people who have some really good and different ideas about competitive intelligence, plus highlight activities that aren’t talked about as much as they should be.

Also, I try to focus attention on the people who have some really good and different ideas about competitive intelligence, plus highlight activities that aren’t talked about as much as they should be.

I currently have over 38,000 subscribers or followers. There is a really good cross section of people who look at it; and, most importantly, these folks send pieces of it to people on their own distribution list or include elements of Scoop.it as part of their own publications. Producing Scoop.it has given me a good perspective on what is going on and I also have developed a much better understanding on how things distribute through social media.

[Sean]:

So, why did other vendors and organizations that make up the SCIP community ignore social for so long? I remember going to our first SCIP conference in San Diego in ’06 or perhaps it was 07 and I was kept asking myself, “Where is the discussion about the Internet in this conference?”

For example, LinkedIn had already launched at this point.  Obviously, it was a fraction of the size of what it is now, but that’s not necessarily a singular excuse as to why it wasn’t being covered. I think Fred Wergles was doing some sessions on mining Internet data, but overall the Internet, as a data source, was simply being ignored. At least that’s my perception of it.

[Bonnie]:

Part of the reason is that the emphasis was on doing the analysis and producing content. People weren’t focusing on the informational part of the effort, which is what social media is. It’s an informational input.

Another reason is that a lot of people don’t like to try something new, particularly if they’re in CI and they’ve got so many new things coming at them.

Another reason is that a lot of people don’t like to try something new, particularly if they’re in CI and they’ve got so many new things coming at them.

The final issue is, when you are engaging via social media you get virtually no feedback from it until magically, for some reason, after maybe six, eight, 12 months, it starts taking off. Then it goes to a different plateau and then it will sit there for a while. It’s very difficult to understand the effort that needs to be put into it and what it is that you can get out of it.

[Sean]:

I also think that, people transitioned from thinking of social media and Internet data as a purely informational input and they realized they could derive really solid quantitative measures from it.

For example, it’s well known that companies will use sites like BuiltWith to figure out, at least in the technology sector that we play in, where their competitor’s product is being actively used. And they get this by mining a clear signal of it being used on a company’s website. There’s no denying that the customer bought the competitor’s product in that case. So overall, I think at times the thinking had to elevate to that, in that you could generate solid quant from social data.

For example, I interviewed one of the folks who heads up NodeXL and he said, “The problem with mining social media is that if 300 people stood in your parking lot and held up a sign, ‘We’re using your competitor’s product’ you would run outside and say, ‘I need to talk to you.'”

But with social it’s never quite that clear. The signal is a little more diffuse. You have to mine it in different ways. And I imagine you also feel the same way.  That folks had to evolve their thinking and that the tools had to evolve along with that.

[Bonnie]:

Exactly. That development of a toolbox is critical and these tools have only fully developed over the last 18 to 24 months. Now we have tools that will do more than generate a summary dashboard of social activity.

[Sean]:

You can mine social media data in a manual mode per se, either through built-in search tools or through APIs, if you have programming chops on your team. But it can be easier to pay $500 a month or so to some kind of toolbox vendor and have them generate meaningful output. That makes a lot of sense.

I agree. The type of tooling you’re talking about has really helped.  You can mine social media data in a manual mode per se, either through built-in search tools or through APIs, if you have programming chops on your team. But it can be easier to pay $500 a month or so to some kind of toolbox vendor and have them generate meaningful output. That makes a lot of sense.

Let’s swing back to something you addressed earlier, which is that you have this very top-down view of the topics that matter to the competitive intelligence audience. What are some of the topics that you have found to be more popular than others?

[Bonnie]:

The topics that are going to be popular are very focused on a specific issue or problem. For instance, a post that shows you how to approach something differently, how to think about it differently or how to use another tool.

On the opposite side, I’m seeing a lot of interest in overview material. I’ve seen material that has been published by some of the major consulting firms, the McKenzie’s and the Ernst & Young’s. They’ve focused on trends and how you might react to them.

[Sean]:

Those are all fair points. What do you wish you saw more of when it comes to the stuff that’s coming across inbox so to speak?

[Bonnie]:

I would like to see a bit more co-operation in terms of people sharing what they know. As you indicated earlier, a lot of stuff is being thrown out there that generates a limited impact. I’d like to see more people saying, “Is this important? Is this not important? Maybe I should look at this a little differently.”

That leads into a new website that I just launched called DecisionIntelligence.org.  My goal is to put up quality material and also to generate more of a social network, if you want to call it that, of people who are interested in, do and use CI. People can post their ideas and can comment on if something is relevant to them. Additionally, they may bring up some issues that need to be looked at.

[Sean]:

One thing I find interesting about the field of competitive intelligence is that people in the field aren’t that fond of sharing, at least in a public context.  By contrast other communities, technology centered communities for example, are much more engaging.

I agree. One thing I find interesting about the field of competitive intelligence is that people in the field aren’t that fond of sharing, at least in a public context.  By contrast other communities, technology centered communities for example, are much more engaging.

For example if you take a group of developers and IT professionals, they are going to be very forthcoming about what they share. Comment threads might run to the hundreds or the thousands of comments on certain sites – for technology-centric communities that is. But when you focus on other areas such as competitive intelligence, I think there is a natural reluctance to share.

I believe you and I have had a similar experience, in that when you speak at a competitive intelligence conference you almost feel compelled to say to the audience, “It’s really okay to talk. I’m not expecting you to give away your company’s strategy, but there are some things we can talk about.” You see the same thing at market research conferences, albeit to a lesser degree.

And this reluctance to share happens in other venues as well. For example if you take your average group of sales people, they’ll talk about what they do to generate sales, at a high level. But at some point, they’ll stop sharing. So I think you’re on to something in that the community involvement is sometimes quite tempered in the CI community.

Given that do you have any comments as to how we might solve that particular challenge?

[Bonnie]:

We have lot of silos in competitive intelligence. It’s been difficult to get people to break across those silos to say, “Well, I’m just an R&D intelligence person,” or “I’m just a sales intelligence person,” or “I just work for a certain industry.” We need to be able to get these folks to share on a high level what’s going on for them, why it’s important and what it is that we can learn.

If we don’t, it’s going to hold back any one person’s ability to communicate what’s going on in the competitive intelligence community. We don’t have a common exchange of information across all these types of roles.

[Sean]:

Yeah, I would absolutely agree. What’s the biggest change that you’ve seen in competitive intelligence since you started?

[Bonnie]:

That’s a difficult question to answer because the core element of what competitive intelligence is and how it’s used hasn’t really changed over the years. The focus has always been to improve the decision making and make the company as competitive as it possibly can.

Obviously the technology is a big change. Being able to incorporate that kind of activity. Opening up CI and its skill sets into other areas is another difference I’ve seen.

Obviously the technology is a big change. Being able to incorporate that kind of activity. Opening up CI and its skill sets into other areas is another difference I’ve seen.

One of the projects I’m working on right now, is looking at job descriptions on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed that ask for a competitive intelligence skill set. Specifically, they’ll say as a requirement, “competitive intelligence skills.” I’m seeing that all over the place.

You’ve got the product managers; you’ve got the supply chain people. You’ve got, obviously, the R&D, the strategy and the marketing. You’re getting a lot of requests by the people who hire them for people who may be not 100 percent competitive intelligence, but need that skill set to apply it. It’s the diffusion of that skill set across disciplines is probably the biggest change I’ve seen.

[Sean]:

I would concur. I think a lot of people who lead firms in this area-ourselves included-probably have noticed that their own work, their own projects, don’t necessarily always come from these centralized CI team. Market researchers would maybe be similar, right? They would say, “The product group or the marketing group sometimes commission the effort.”

If you go into LinkedIn and search for the keyword “competitive” or “competitive intelligence” — and you don’t filter on titles that contain that keyword — you’re going to find a lot of people in CI-like roles. When you read the summary of what they do, they may be a director of product development. But the first two sentences will say things like, “Need to analyze the competitive landscape. Define areas of opportunity. Aggregate competitive intelligence on the market that we’re in.”

I think you’re right — here needs to be a place for those people to come. How does the community effectively embrace people that it’s really only the Monday of their week that they pay attention to competitive intelligence? Those people, perhaps more so than the full timers, per se, actually need the info, right?

[Bonnie]:

Correct.

[Sean]:

It’s only one fifth of their week and yet the content tends to cater, sometimes, to the people who it’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday that they think about CI. What are you doing to help that a bit? I imagine it might be on your mind, given the properties you own.

[Bonnie]:

Part of that is, I think, is addressed through the two sites that I’m working on. I am trying to open up who knows a little bit more about CI, who’s participating in it and to get people to share information. Other than that I really have no magic bullet. I, to a large extent, put in what’s of interest to me and — by proxy — assume that someone will find it of interest.

[Sean]:

Well, that’s fair. You’ve got a pretty good read on the CI community from either the books you put together and/or the sites you currently own. And I think most people would agree that’s going to serve you pretty well, Bonnie.

[Bonnie]:

Thanks.

[Sean]:

With that, I just want to thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks to our listeners for being along with us.

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