[6th Edition] Go Beyond Google: Competitive Intelligence for B2B Tech: B2B Market Research Podcast

Modified Transcript:

Welcome to another episode of the Competitive Intel Podcast. In this episode we’re going to talk about the newest edition of our book, just released, called Going Beyond Google: Gathering B2B Competitive Intelligence from the Web, now in its sixth edition.

Before we get into that though, a few brief programming notes. One, this podcast is brought to you by Cascade Insights. Cascade Insights specializes in competitive intelligence services for B2B technology companies. Our focus on the B2B technology sector helps us deliver detailed competitive intelligence insights that generalist firms simply can’t compete with. To learn more about us, go to our site and also sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss out on any blog posts, podcast episodes or articles from us. You can do that at cascadeinsights.com/subscribe.

With that, let’s go ahead and get into the podcast. I think probably the first thing to talk about is just a little bit of history about the book. This book is in its sixth edition after, essentially, only after about four and one-half years. The reason we update the book so frequently is that the space we focus on in the book, in essence, changes daily. We’re talking about things like mining social media, mining job postings, in essence, mining things from the Web. And the Web is one of the most changing assets you could find in the world, in a sense.

Another big thing about the book is, we’re talking about B2B technology, so we’re not talking about how you can mine the Internet for consumer sentiment about dish soap. We’re talking about how you can mine the Internet for insights about the B2B landscape and, even more specifically, how you can mine it for insights about B2B technology trends, companies and general initiatives focused on that sector.

Another thing you might be interested in is, what essentially has changed in the book? The first thing is, by keeping it updated, you can be guaranteed that basically every topic or tool that we cover in the book (and we cover, literally, a hundred-plus different types of tools, websites, techniques, etc.) are basically as current as today. That’s really one of the key benefits of the book, in that when you go to one of those pages in the book and you learn about a given tool, you can be guaranteed that that screen shot is up to date, that the methods for using that site are up to date, and it can really accelerate your competitive intelligence efforts just for that fact alone.

The other thing we do with every edition is we add or even sometimes subtract some tools if they’ve gone away. This is a changing space, so there are a few tools that have been removed because they’re no longer publicly available. Sometimes they get bought by another organization, sometimes they’re just closed.

We also highlight a few tools a little bit differently. In this version of the book, we talk up a little more about some of the business social networking sites that go beyond LinkedIn. LinkedIn is still the predominant B2B site. There are three hundred million business profiles on LinkedIn, so it’s a great database for mining intelligence from, but there’s are also some other sites that you need to take a look at as well.

We also have rounded out a little more our discussion of job posting aggregation. When you talk about job posting analysis in a competitive intelligence context, a lot of people immediately jump to the conclusion that you’re looking at job postings in the context of job postings offered by the competitor, in terms of what are they hiring for? What we talk about in the book is how to use job postings across multiple industries to look at the incidence of how often a technology is being used or a given service is being used. It’s a great tool in that regard.

We also spend a little bit more time talking about website analysis and how that blends into content marketing analysis, because in this day and age the sales cycle is also, as some people have said, a very digitally-enhanced cycle in the sense that there’s a lot of the marketing cycle that very much blurs into the sales cycle. We want to talk a little bit about how companies can analyze competitor content marketing and talk a little bit about how they can take a look at web traffic analysis and things like that.

We’ve also spent a little bit of time updating the section on Twitter. Twitter is probably one of the faster moving spaces that we cover every time we update the book. Tools in this space tend to grow in their capabilities and sometimes also disappear, so we’ve updated this section so you’re looking at the latest and greatest tools that you could focus on.

Finally, we’ve also included some additional Q and A sections. These are sections we didn’t have in the first version of the book. I think we added them in the third edition or the fourth, and we’ve continued to expand them. Basically, we spend a little bit of time talking about, in-depth, how you might use one of these tools, in a Q and A format.

These are some of the questions I get from audiences when I would give conference presentations because I’ve given lots of conference presentations on the techniques in the book.

If you want to get access to the book, all you have to do is go to cascadeinsights.com/gbg to download a copy. Thanks for listening and hope to have you along on the next podcast.