Are you aware that the same technology that tells you your best friend from high school's daughter lost a tooth can also provide highly actionable competitive insights? Yes, I'm talking about social media.
Savvy organizations have long used competitive intelligence (CI) to understand their competitors' strategies. Pairing CI with social media broadens the scope of the CI function to include additional tactical and strategic information. This is different than knowing about how your competitors use social media. Harnessing CI in social media requires new tactics and resources, but if you're already tapped into your market, it's more about broadening and scaling your thinking.
A 2009 survey by Hoovers found that 75% of respondents didn't use social media for competitive intelligence, so if you aren't using social media to enhance your competitive intelligence capabilities, you're not alone. However, read on and I'll help you understand three actionable opportunities you are missing:
- Combating misinformation about your company and products
- Enabling rapid response marketing
- Improving long-term product development.
Combat misinformation
By monitoring your own customers, you know how much misinformation exists on the Web. Avaya famously landed a $250,000 deal that started on Twitter with a simple request for information. What if it had started with a barb aimed at Avaya? Social media communities enable you for the first time to efficiently address the tsunami of misinformation by intentionally looking in non-familiar forums such as comments on a competitor's blog. The scale of what's monitored is enlarged, but the response is familiar: respond in real-time to erroneous and misleading information with facts, references, and links to the correct information while avoiding opinions that undermine your credibility.
Rapid response marketing
The social web is becoming more personal so consumers expect your messaging to evolve. By obtaining a real-time window into issues and problems facing your competitors, you have the opportunity to proactively respond with timely messaging or programs targeting the customers or products affected and capitalizing on the specific problem. If a competitor is having supply or quality problems, offer a targeted upgrade program. To quote Ray Kroc, "If I saw a competitor drowning I'd put a live fire hose in his mouth." While launch messaging often takes weeks or months to tune and perfect, the social media grapevine enables you to leverage a changing environment, especially competitive missteps, to your competitive advantage. With the competitor working hard to remediate the issues, you can't afford to wait; too often the opportunity will be gone before you can respond.
Long-term product improvement
You probably already talk to your customers about how to improve your products. That's good. The savviest companies are learning to also talk-or at least listen-to users of competitive products. What features or capabilities do they really want and why? What are key challenges or objections? User forums are good, but don't overlook professional or social communities where key competitor staff might brag or vent. Better than a focus group or interviews, social media also lets you see your competitors' responses and often their rationale. They may explain why a requested feature won't be in the next release that provides important insights into their strategy or operations. As the MasterCard commercials say, this is priceless.
The examples above highlight how social media opens the doors to additional applications for CI-some with a very immediate impact-that can give your company a competitive edge in today's rapidly changing markets.
Will monitoring social media to gain competitive advantage be useful for your company?