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Karen E. Rothwell is director of Outward Insights, a Boston-area strategy and competitive intelligence consulting firm. She is responsible for competitive intelligence consulting, coaching and training across multiple industries.It's a dream of many businesses: to be invisible and listen to conversations that clients and customers -- or even better, potential clients and customers -- have about your product or service or their experience with your competitors. But many businesses have yet to realize that they have had that ability for some time -- through the Internet.
Blogs, wikis and other social hubs on the Internet can be windows into a company's market -- the needs, biases and likes of customers; experiences with competitors; and inspiration for product development or marketing approaches. "What sets these vehicles apart from more traditional sources is that the individuals participating in these media are freely volunteering their opinions. ... The information shared in such venues is honest and raw -- and far more revealing than traditional surveys or phone interviews," writes Karen Rothwell of the competitive intelligence firm Outward Insights.
Using the search skills of its own employees or relying on software that monitors the Internet for a company, a firm then must constantly retrieve, sift and evaluate the information it uncovers. And since information on the Internet is often in real time, it is crucial to stay up to date and to be able to act quickly. Complaints and attacks, warranted or not, can spread quickly from blog to blog. If noticed quickly, flaws in products or services, misunderstandings about a product's purpose or customer service issues can often be addressed before they become a serious business impediment. Likewise, conversations about competitors can reveal weaknesses that can be exploited or advantages that can be countered.
Rothwell suggests four steps for handling and evaluating such intelligence quickly and thoroughly.
POSTED BY: Steve Nimmons (July 05, 2008 10:18 AM)
Very interesting remarks. As well as looking at this from a purely marketing position there are also a number of possibilities in security, privacy and IPR protection. Intelligence tooling is very useful from the perspective of reputation defense (as you mentioned in terms of monitoring negative feedback) and I think it also helps find leaks in the sieve of corporate intelligence that might (deliberately or not) be seeping through the corporate firewall and into the Web2.0 domain.
I see new functions for security and marketing working hand in hand to analyze brand reputation, information leakage as well as exposure of employees to Social Engineering attacks.
POSTED BY: ron towns (July 07, 2008 02:51 PM)
Not only is user feedback from online social hubs raw, but it also creates a conversation between brand and user, acting as relationship builder and customer service tool.
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