Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

MarkIntell.com for Sale

Want to buy a CI-related website?  MarkIntell.com is for sale.

Competitive Intelligence Quotes

On the lighthearted side of things, a discussion has broken out at the Ning CI group about peoples' favorite quotes related to CI and strategy.  My personal favorite so far is the Donald Rumsfeld quote:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

Naylor: Win Loss Analysis is More Than CI

At her blog Cooperative Intelligence Ellen Naylor has a post about win-loss analysis and how she's discovering a new way to look at it through the eyes of a non-CI professional services rainmaker:

What I found most interesting was Ford’s experience in professional services firms where partners do the work and make or lose the sale so there isn’t a dedicated sales force.  Ford’s focus isn’t competitive intelligence so his perspective is valuable to those of us with our heads in the competitive intelligence sandbox.

Jackson: Your Competitors Don't All Look Like You

August Jackson has a fine post that essentially expounds on his statement that "your competition is any entity that can deliver the same fundamental value to the customer that you do."  He invokes Saturday Night Live and Guitar Hero so you know it has to be good.

Alacra Has More on the Demise of Sell Side Research

At AlacraBlog they continue their look into the decline of sell side research and offer this interesting tidbit at the end:

Alacra has seen an increase in the number of buy-side accounts purchasing content from the Alacra Store (www.alacrastore.com), and a similar increase in the number of buy-side firms with access to Alacra Premium.  More traditional market research is being used as investment research and, somewhat surprisingly, credit research is being consumed as a substitute for equity research.  Just as the sell-side research arena is unrecognizable compared to this time last year, it will be similarly unrecognizable one year forward from what it is today. 

Visual Presentation of Analytic Reports and How to Create Them

Sources and Methods has a short post on converting short form text analytic reports to a visual format and tools that are available to accomplish the task.  

Using del.icio.us to Mine Data for Pharmaceutical CI

Over at the Pharma Strategy Blog Sally Church has a good post on mining social bookmarking site del.icio.us to mine data for competitive intelligence and and marketing purposes:

Recently, I was interested in general trends relating to several pharma companies.  Let's take a quick look at 4 of them, Novartis, Pfizer,Genentech and Amgen.  Once signed into Delicious, I can search for information where people have tagged the companies, drugs, pathways etc.

Use of Social Media and Playmaking in CI

Sally Church attended the SCIP DC Chapter's "New Ways of Knowing 2.0" event last week and offers some interesting context for the discussion:

In the old world, asymmetry of information and hence control of that information was much more prevalent.  In the new world, the internet provides a much faster and more transparent data set for those enlightened enough to recognise the changing order.  CI professionals who can find and utilise this data, essentially re-create a more balanced world since everyone has access to Google and a huge wealth of information accessible in the public domain, including sources such as Twitter.  Out of chaos comes new patterns.

$100 Off SCIP09 Through March 31

Just received an email from SCIP that says they've knocked $100 off of their regular registration rate for SCIP09.  The $100 break is good through March 31 and the reduced hotel room rate is good through March 27, so make sure to register between now and the end of March to get significant discounts.  Visit the SCIP09 site for full details.

How to Reach Car Buyers Online

Sorgenfrei has an interesting report on how some auto dealers are more effective in getting top search rankings for their sites:

After looking at 2,400 search results from 148 different website builders in 20 markets across 12 brands, we discovered two companies performed significantly better than their competitors with over a third of the top placement results being from their clients. This is significant since 42% of all clicks on a Google search page is on the first listed result.

A PDF version of the report is available on the post.