Tag Archive for: competitive intelligence

The “Competitive Intel” Episode 3 Transcript – Every Day OSINT — LinkedIn, Slideshare, and Quora

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Open source intelligence can make you more effective every day, in a wide variety of tasks—not just competitive intelligence. Sales, marketing, planning, and executive roles benefit from a sharper understanding of what others are doing in the industry, and effective use of free information from your web browser is a key approach. We use a lot of specialized tools for niche tasks, but here’s a few that we use every day.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers a wealth of open source intelligence. In many companies, especially tech companies, the majority of employees have LinkedIn profiles. The company pages are also a wealth of information. The site also provides very robust search, making it an excellent first stop for information on a company, market segment, or other topic of interest.

The breadth of coverage on LinkedIn makes semi-statistical data gathering, as well. This factor is enormously helpful for topics such as: where employees are physically located, hiring trends, and the specific size of organizations within the company, such as sales compared to the company as a whole (or yours). In fact, we have even reverse-engineered competitors’ customer lists using public data available on LinkedIn.

SlideShare

Slightly less well-known but also extraordinarily useful, SlideShare.net bills itself as aspiring to be “the YouTube of PowerPoint.” This enormous repository of slide presentations gives you access to information carefully collated and assembled by presenters for ease of understanding.

Whereas a company’s Web site might provide meager insight, SlideShare tends to have information from sales presentations, technical sessions, and even invitation-only events that would otherwise not be available to you in any form. Often, you can even find analyses done by external consultants that provide a perspective that those inside the company wouldn’t provide.

Quora

Often dismissed in competitive intelligence but growing richer every day, social Q&A sites like Quora are an excellent source to monitor conversations about topics of interest. We saw a comparison of social sites recently—Twitter: “I ate a donut;” Facebook: “I like donuts;” LinkedIn: “I have experience with donuts.” If that’s the case, Quora might answer “How profitable is a typical donut store?”.

The conversational format at Quora also leads to situations where people post information defending themselves, their product, or their company. That kind of interaction is gold for a bystander collecting intelligence. Synthesizing and filtering that information is a direct route to insights you wouldn’t expect.

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart

The “Competitive Intel” Episode 2 Transcript – Ethics Applied

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Questions of ethics are always a point of interest in competitive intelligence (CI), and workshops on this topic are a staple of industry conferences. Guidelines such as the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) Code of Ethics are a great start, as are legal or ethical guidelines established by your company or customers. Our discussion here adds to that type of formal policy with discussion that can help CI professionals establish their own ethical foundations.

Scenario: Avoiding the Temptation of Identity Games

Most of us have at least considered whether we would get an advantage by hiding our true intent when we are gathering competitive intelligence. Whether as simple as turning a conference badge backward or as complex as inventing an elaborate cover story, not disclosing who you are violates a core ethical requirement. It’s worth mentioning that the same is true online, and creating fake social networking profiles for the purpose of collecting CI is out of bounds.

Note that these ethical considerations are binding even if you know for certain that competitors are being unethical toward you. The tendency to do otherwise follows from the “business is war” mentality, but we should all recognize that even in war, participants are subject to rules of engagement such as the Geneva Convention.

Scenario: Overhearing Sensitive Information

Imagine that the person next to you on an airplane is talking on their cell phone about sensitive information that could benefit you or your client. They may be talking about flaws in their product, for example, or challenges they are having in selling. What do you do? In this case, we would not feel ethically bound to stop them from disclosing the information.

That person has an obligation to protect the sensitive information, and this situation represents a failure on their part to fulfill their responsibility, rather than an ethical breach on your part. This sort of failure to keep information private is no different, from an ethical point of view, than inadvertently disclosing information in job postings or LinkedIn profiles, which are typically considered “in bounds” for CI research.

Scenario: Identifying Limits on Full Disclosure

Consider being on a call conducting research for a client, when your research subject asks you who the research is for. While you clearly must identify yourself, it is a different question altogether whether you are ethically bound to disclose the identity of your client (which could also be a violation of the client’s privacy).

The way to handle this conundrum is to avoid it altogether by being forthright up front about the fact that you are not a potential customer, for example, when you are talking to a sales professional. If you identify yourself as a CI professional but say, “I can’t tell you whom I am calling for,” you have done your ethical duty. That practice can also play a key role in avoiding the appearance of impropriety, which is vital to protecting your reputation, which benefits you in the long run.

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart

The “Competitive Intel” Episode 1 Transcript – CES and Trade Show Intelligence

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Industry events are outstanding opportunities for gathering information from competitors, customers, partners, and distributors. There’s a gold mine there for the taking, in terms of how to develop and position your products and services in the marketplace. Still, that same hyper-focused nature of these events means you need a well organized approach to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Making Your Approach Smooth and Steady

There’s a lot happening at industry trade shows, all at once, and there’s a limited amount of time. Being methodical is the key to transforming that frenzy of activity into a bonanza of insight:

  • Unimpeachable ethics: Be frank and truthful about who you are and why you’re there. In our years of experience, we have found that people manning booths are eager to share information, and they appreciate it when those who approach them are honest and well-informed.
  • Thorough planning: Know what you’re doing before you arrive. Ahead of time, you should establish questions that you want to have answered, and by whom. That plan needs to be updated at least nightly during the event, since new information will keep coming in.
  • Smart approach: Choose the right time to walk up to the booth. Watch for an opportunity when you’re not part of a crowd, especially when traffic is light such as early in the morning, during lunch, or at the end of the day. To polish your delivery, practice at a booth or two less important to your goals.

Engaging with the People at the Booth

Your first goal in gathering intelligence is to get the people working at booths talking, and starting with a simple question, such as “what are you demonstrating?” can be the best way to break the ice.

Focusing on getting them to talk in their own sphere of expertise can also let you know more about the person you’re talking to, in terms of their role, how technical they are, etc. If you see that you need to talk to someone in a different role, you can guide the conversation in that direction, which opens more doors to the information you need.

Taking Full Advantage of Resources

A lot of information is available on the expo floor, but keynotes and break-out sessions are also vital, since that’s where companies make announcements and detail their technology. Have questions ready and gather contact information so you can follow up later.

When doing trade show intelligence, you should send out updates every night, and at the end of the event. Those shouldn’t be simply summary and reportage but need to include real analysis and insights to transform copious raw intelligence into targeted business insight.

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart