Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Carpe: How the Social internet simplifies source identification

David Carpe webifies his article from Competitive Intelligence Magazine:

SITES WITH INFORMATION ABOUT PEOPLE

Rather than walk you through a dizzying array of sites, I’ll cluster these assorted tools into a few large groups and grade several as if they were students in the class of Web 2.0 (where there are no straight A students). From here, you can easily identify those sites worthy of your honest time and consideration. As you may imagine, this list is by no means exhaustive.

Three Online Competitive Research Tools

Paulson Management Group posted a list of Competitive Analysis, Paid Search and SEO Tools.  Here's what they had listed under Competitive Analysis:

Compete.com - Lets you see traffic trends of competing websites, demographic information as well as other important predictors.

quantcast.com - I verified on three sites the monthly uniques are pretty close, good tool for competitive intelligence.

Xinu.com - This one is my new favorite - This tool will be very important as the new Google Universal search is being slowly integrated over the next 6 months. Check it out.

CI Podcast: How Tomorrow's Technologies Can Help Us Today

CI Podcast's newest show is SLA: How Tomorrow's Technologies Can Help Us Today.  Here's August's description:

Recently I came across several podcasts from the annual conference of the Special Libraries Association (http://www.sla.org).  I thought these were very useful programs.  I am working with SLA to get the appropriate releases to share all of these programs with the CI Podcast listening audience. 

In this session J.P. Sherman talks about search engine optimization and how this relates to competitiveness and competitive intelligence.  Randy Marcinko discusses the important relationship between content and meta-data.

Using Web 2.0 in Intelligence - Newest CI Podcast released

August Jackson's latest CI Podcast features an interview with two students from the Mercyhurst Institute for Intelligence Studies who participated in a NIC project that utilized Web 2.0 tools.  The result of the project is the Wiki on Global Diseases.

A-Space: The Spooks' Facebook

The idea of the folks at the CIA using facebook for recruitment seems a little strange at first, but when you think about it maybe not so much. They aren't stopping with recruitment in their use of social networking platforms.  From The Bivings Report:

Interesting, the Financial Times reports today that the intelligence community within the United States government sees more use to social networking sites than just recruitment.  As the government is trying to improve inter-agency communication that plagued it before the 9/11 attacks, the paper reports that, "Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of 'MySpace for analysts' – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community."

According to this article, the government expects to deploy the social network — named "A-Space" — to all of its intelligence agencies by December. 

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide

LLRX.com (a website targeted to the legal profession) has a fairly extensive list of CI resources put together by Sabrina Pacifici and updated on June 25, 2007.  They call it Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide and the list is broken down into the following categories:

• Selected Search Engines for Web, Blogs, Video, News and Alerts
• Selected Business Info Websites, Databases, Blogs - Fee and Free
• Selected Online People Tracking Sources
• Television and Radio News Transcripts
• Legislative Monitoring and Tracking
• E-Newsletters, Online Newspapers, Journals and News Sources
• Monitoring Trends, Companies and Products
• Selected RSS Feeds From Business Related News
• Identification of Company Legal Representation
• Online Tools for Competitor Monitoring
• Westlaw Watch and Lexis Trackers
• Benchmarking and Country Profiles
• CI Pathfinders and Link Collections
• Web Directories and Portals
• Website Trackers

CI Podcast: Primary Research and LinkedIn

August Jackson's latest CI Podcast features an interview with Roger Phelps, who talks about primary research techniques and using LinkedIn as a primary research tool.

CI Consultants, Get Ye to LinkedIn Post Haste

A word of advice to all my CI consultant friends: get your rear end to LinkedIn in a hurry.  Why?  Well, I think it's primed to become the place of choice for executives looking for quick answers to their questions.  An example to make my point is a question titled "Paid Search -- Competitive Intelligence Vendors" posted on July 24, 2007.  Within five days the question garnered eight replies.

Now this question is geared to LinkedIn's current sweet spot of early adapters, i.e. tech/search folks, but I think that it's a sign of things to come.  An added twist: I found this question because it showed up in my "competitive intelligence" Google Alert, which means that the search engines pick up these Q&A listings which means that if you're there with an answer to someone's question then when someone else searches that topic and finds the question you'll get the benefit of those search results too.   Like I said, I think you should check it out.

LexisNexis Launching ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Fighting Service

LexisNexis announced the launch of a service that seems to be intended to compete with ZoomInfo and LinkedIn among others.  From the press release:

(PressZoom) - NEW YORK, NY , July 25, 2007 - LexisNexis, a leading provider of information and services solutions, today announced the launch of ExecRelate™ ( www.execrelate.com ), a subscription based service that provides intelligence on directors, executives, and their relationships. Business development professionals, executive recruiters, and competitive intelligence analysts can leverage ExecRelate to find connections to executives and understand who is influencing the marketplace. Board memberships, corporate family structures, and executive-to-executive relationships offer rich insights into who is driving business for whom.

Using LinkedIn to Network at SCIP Euro Summit

A CI consultant named Christian Swalmius-Dato is using LinkedIn to try and set up networking opportunities for the SCIP European Summit in being held in October in Germany.  If you're going to be at the Summit you should check it out.

FYI, here's the link to SCIP's Summit webpage.