Tap the Social Media Stream for Competitors' Secrets reads the headline in a recent article on CIO.com. The story looks at how, "Savvy companies are monitoring Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to pick up valuable competitive intelligence about their rivals' product specs, pricing, finances and dissatisfied customers."
The article provides a couple interesting monitoring examples. It makes suggestions on monitoring options such as either hiring outside experts or doing it in-house with paid for (or sometimes free) software tools.
It also cautions to 'beware data overload', which frankly couldn't be better advice!
We have helped a number of companies create on-line listening programs to track competitors (or prospects). Where everyone seems to struggle is in the sorting through and filtering of mountains of available data to find those links that are truly relevant. Don't let that be an excuse for getting started. Valuable information is out there and not developing an approach to establishing at least a modest 'listening' program is very shortsighted.
Three Steps to Getting Started With Online / Social Media Monitoring
Start Simple and Low Cost
Tools like Google Alerts and Hootsuite let you monitor a massive amount of Internet content for no to very low cost. Set up a couple simple alerts and start following Twitter feeds on things like targeted company names, important hashtags, key individuals or important prospects / accounts.
Set a Schedule
Once a week run a couple reports, update your filters, check out the links on some of the results and start to get a sense of what's being talked about. Think about who else in your organization might benefit from seeing the filtered data and bring them in on it (consider sales, marketing, product development, customer operations).
Resist Overcomplicating It
You can build a very capable listening program to monitor competitors, prospects, your industry, your own company, etc. without spending a fortune on sophisticated tools. There are also plenty of companies that specialize in this kind of activity that have low entry cost options where they manage the tools and filter out the irrelevant findings for you. For many companies that is a far better option than having to learn a new suite of software tools and burden an already overloaded internal resource.
Want to talk about what we have seen and kick around some ideas? Drop us a note and we will be glad to put it on the calendar.
