Workshop in Silicon Valley - Hosted by Silicon Valley Product Management Association

We’ll be delivering a 1/2 day workshop for the Silicon Valley Product Management Association on December 4th.

High level outline below….

Workshop Summary

Understanding your competitors’ next moves or knowing how well they are putting their current plans into effect can mean the difference between success and failure in your market. During this seminar you’ll learn how to leverage social media, search the deep Web, and use human intelligence to gather actionable insight into your competitors’ future direction. However, there are ethical pitfalls in conducting competitive intelligence studies – we’ll reveal what they are and discuss how you can avoid them.

This ½ day workshop will cover all you need to know on how to gather competitive intelligence via Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) resources, elicit information from human intelligence sources, how to apply the information you’ve learned to product planning, product marketing, and sales efforts, and lastly how to pull it all together and communicate it effectively throughout the organization.

Session topics:

Mining Social Media
How to mine social networking sites for valuable competitive intelligence information. You’ll learn how to determine critical facts and information about your competitors – where they are investing, features of their upcoming products and tips on identifying their customers.

Mining The Deep Web
How you can use free web tools and sites such as SlideShare, Silobreaker, Glassdoor, and other targeted search engines, portals, and sites to get a much better view of your competitors’ positioning, and their current activity in your market. You’ll learn about their culture and ethics; their strategies, as disclosed by their own leadership; how to quickly get a deep understanding of their offerings; and even see how they stack up against your company.

Human Intelligence and Qualitative Research
How to identify and recruit individuals who can provide insight into your competitors’ moves and the industry trends you’re facing. We’ll show you how to conduct effective interviews once you’ve identified the right potential targets in partner, reseller, and influencer channels. We’ll also discuss techniques to make recruiting these individuals more effective via social networking and in person events. Lastly, we’ll highlight ethical and legal concerns that you need to take into account when conducting these types of activities.

Pulling It All Together
Pull together human and OSINT sources to show you how can effectively package competitive intelligence for internal consumption, package it for partner, field, or customer audiences, and how to recognize when competitive intelligence efforts should be paused or change direction.