Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

del.icio.us Tag Mining for Brand Research

Lisa Braziel at Ignite Social Media has an interesting post about using tag mining on social bookmarking service del.icio.us for brand research.  From her post:

Perhaps one of the most valuable but often overlooked data available on Delicious are the tags and notes by retailer. These are quick glimpses into the words and phrases associated with a brand, and are valuable in determining the brand associations your customers have with your company. To demonstrate the value in this, I’ve taken a side by side comparison of competing retailers (in the top 50): 

Braziel then does a side-by-side comparison of companies like Staples/Office Depot, Trader Joes/Whole Foods, AT&T/Verizon, etc.  It's an interesting idea and an easy read.

You are What You Tweet

Sometimes it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that no one's reading when you use new forms of communication like Twitter.  For instance you might only have a few dozen followers on Twitter, but all it takes is one to read something you might have written hastily or as an inside joke and take it in the wrong way and then share it with friends and colleagues for you to let an unwanted genie out of the bottle.  Case in point: an agency exec in Memphis to meet with FedEx, a rather substantial client of his, Tweeted something negative about Memphis, someone at FedEx read it and then shared it with his coworkers.  The exec ended up with an upset client and a lot of explaining to do.

Here's another consideration: all of this applies even if your Twitter account (or blog, or Facebook page, or MySpace page, etc.) are personal.  Writing something negative on your personal account is no different than standing on a street corner and shouting, and although in America that's your right as a citizen it will not endear you with your employer or clients if you shout nasty things about them, their hometown, or their families.  A good rule of thumb is to write like you're talking in an elevator; you have to assume that someone's listening.   

Why Lenny Fuld Would Like to Meet Harry Markopolis

Lenny Fuld highlights the value of the contrarians in our midst when he explains why he'd like to meet a character in the Madoff mess:

The real lesson lies not with the intelligence brilliance of Harry Markopolos but with the need for all of us to take a second look at the contrarians who are always among us.   Nearly 10 years ago I sat with the Chairman of Motorola, Chris Galvin, who told me he always wants to see the minority report.  No matter how certain, how comfortable you may be with an answer, a popular answer, an answer that comforts or confirms, you need to pay attention to other perspectives. That is what intelligence is all about.  It’s about listening to the minority and taking them seriously.
That is why I’d like to meet Harry Markopolos.

All About XBRL

AlacraBlog has a post about XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language that links to interesting thoughts about XBRL, including some of Mark Cuban's thoughts on using XBRL to track the bailout.  In a way the most surprising thing about reading the post is realizing that there's still a need to develop standards in various and sundry sectors of our information society.  Imagine when they start trying to do the same in health care!  The last paragraph of the Alacra post is telling:

And perhaps most importantly, the SEC voted 4-1 today to require 500 of the largest public companies to begin filing financial reports using the technology known as XBRL, or extensible business reporting language, by mid-2009. The rest of the companies will be phased in over a two-year period, the SEC said.  We expect that supply (Edgar-Online products, as one example) has been ahead of demand for XBRL products up until now, but we believe that will change rapidly in the next few months.  The XBRL future is here.

AlacraBlog: Equity Research Business Changing

According to AlacraBlog the changes that are occurring in the equity research business are going to continue in 2009 (bold emphasis in the following quote is mine):

The equity research arena is a mess, and this affects not only buy-side firms who are the main consumers, but also sell-side and professional service firms who consume research after a week or two embargo.  We've been finding more and more customers looking at independent research providers to supplement the shrinking amount of product available from the street.  I recommend reading the Business Week article, but more importantly read Integrity ResearchWatch, the blog of Integrity Research, which follows the research space as closely as anyone and Information Arbitrage where the latest post opines on the coming disaggregation and specialization of Wall Street.

Opportunity perchance?

Info Stream from Frost & Sullivan's CI Event in New Orleans

Several people are "tweeting" live from the CI event being held by Frost & Sullivan this week in New Orleans, with the most prolific contributors being August Jackson and Arik Johnson.  You can see the stream here.  Some of my favorite nuggets of information:

• If you get a rumor from the C-Suite you need to kill it or validate it.
• For competitive sales battlecards need to align information to customers' buying decisions.
• Designate audiences for your products, have multiple comms channels. Brand your stuff. Match channel and medium to audience.
• Practitioners think about how quickly you respond to requests to set realistic client expectations.
• Get Sr. Exec buy-in in writing. Helps sell participation down the org, prevent exec being forwtful by reminding them of comittment.
• "What do you need to know" PLUS "What new info is available" MINUS "What have you validated" = CI Gap to be filled inside or out.

Much more available in the stream.

Silobreaker and Open Source Intelligence

Mats Bjore has a nice post at Blog Source Intelligence that helps explain what Silobreaker is and what it does:

Intelligence gathering and sharing should be more collaborative, more bottom-up in its thinking - a real silo breaker in the true sense of the word. With billions of dollars being spent on new intelligence technologies, precious little is being invested in global data capture, discovery, and understanding. There is no shortage of information today. In fact, it is the overload that is crippling us and leading us down a proverbial blind alley. What is missing from most intelligence tools is the ability to see the whole in context.
Even in small countries like Sweden, there is a wealth of money spent on intelligence, but for what purposes? The insight and benefits we gain as a nation from the products that the different agencies produce are very small at best. The legacy of secrecy is today not only protecting the few secrets and sources that might be worth protecting, but it is also protecting the fact that the lion share of what these agencies provide could be provided by anyone, at a fraction of the cost and much more timely. Small networked and flexible companies and organization have the information advantage today...
In other words Silobreaker is a virtual Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) center that focuses on the public information found in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, video, web sites, blogs, and more.
Unlike large content aggregators and Internet search engines which are data-rich and information-poor and present their results in a linear perspective, Silobreaker is an insightful discovery tool that extracts meaning from unstructured news flow, clusters and visualizes it for deeper analysis, and Silobreaker provides the contextual intelligence necessary for making decisions and taking action.

How Does Meaning Extraction Work?

Northern Light's David Seuss writes a piece about meaning extraction:

Meaning extraction.What exactly is that, you ask?  Other than a catch phrase, one of those one of those unique combinations of words that marketing folks crave to have associated with their brand.I submit this definition of “meaning extraction” for your consideration:
Meaning extraction is an emerging technology that identifies elements of information and concepts contained within documents and document repositories, and surfaces combinations of these informative elements and concepts that imply meaning in the context of the business, professional, or technical purpose of the search process.  Meaning extraction applied to search applications dramatically improves and accelerates a searcher’s ability to gain insight into a topic and answer specific research questions.
Since the above has a theoretical tone that drains all the flash and boom from the concept, I thought it might be useful to provide a real-world example from the pharmaceutical industry.   But as the private meaning extraction applications Northern Light operates for its clients cannot be viewed by anyone but our clients, I will illustrate meaning extraction using a database of research documents that is publicly available. 

He then goes on to do use PubMed for an in-depth illustration.

Open Source Intelligence Secrecy

From Blog Source Intelligence:

Open source intelligence refers to intelligence that is derived from unclassified, legally accessible information sources.
But the fact that the underlying sources of OSINT are unclassified doesn’t mean the resulting intelligence can be disclosed, said Dr. Sims, who is now director of intelligence studies at Georgetown University.
“If it is providing decision advantage [to policymakers], then it is sensitive” and it should be withheld from disclosure, she said. “And decision advantage has nothing to do with the classification of the sources and methods. It has to do with the insights that the intelligence can deliver.”

Much more worth reading.

Searching for Company Directors in Panama

Confidential Resource links to two interesting resources: one is Panama's company registry and the other is a list of Panamanian companies' directors.  The original source of these resources is Dan O'Huiginn's blog which you can find here.  From the blog:

Panama is still one of the biggest and most important tax havens. As well as its absurd tax regime, its corporate disclosure regime means it is very difficult to get information about Panamanian companies.
Or rather, it was. Panama recently put online their company registry. You can now retrieve the names of the current directors of every Panamanian company, as well as all the company's filings themselves (minutes of company meetings, details of shareholdings, ownership, certificates of incorporation etc. etc.) Nice, but you can only search by the name of the company. If you want to find somebody who is dodging tax or doing something else dubious, you really need to search by director's name.
This tool fixes that problem. I've scraped all 600,000 company records, going back 30 years, and indexed by directors.

Read the rest of his post here for some interesting tid-bits on searching for arms dealers and finding relationships to business executives.