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Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence
By Sharon Housley
Competitive Intelligence
Some companies compete by getting into
the minds of their competitors. Competitive Intelligence
is the process of collecting information about competitors
in a competitive environment. These tips and tricks
will help marketers better understand competitive intelligence,
and how to effectively compete in their marketplace.
Individuals and companies use a variety
of methods to gain information about their competitors.
Some methods are controversial, and may even be considered
unethical, but it is important that you are aware of
them. Even if you don't want to use the questionable
tactics yourself, it is important that you and your
staff understand them, so you can be prepared and protected
if your competitors decide to use them to learn your
company strategies or secrets.
Social engineering, commonly thought of
as manipulating people into taking certain actions,
also includes the act of manipulating people into disclosing
information that really should not be disclosed. The
original computer hackers often used this type of social
engineering to obtain passwords or information about
a secure system. Quite often, the weakest points in
a security system are the individuals behind the system.
Be sure to implement a clear policy regarding what information
can and cannot be disclosed, and to whom it can be disclosed.
Having clear policies and security procedures in place
are critical to protecting your company from competitors.
The flip-side of competitive intelligence
is that you can also use competitive intelligence to
improve your business and performance.
There are a number of things business
owners can easily do to assess the competition, which
require very little effort...
Evaluate a competitor's website and the
meta data contained in it. Simply "view" the HTML source
of a website to reveal the meta data. This will give
you some insight into the keywords they are hoping to
rank well for in the search engines. In the process,
you may discover a keyword or phrase that you hadn't
thought of before, but will work well for your company
too.
There are also a variety of web tools
that can assist in uncovering data about competing companies.
For example, Webmaster Elements has a number of tools
that help with competitive intelligence. You can find
and review their selection of Competitive Analysis Tools
at http://www.webmaster-elements.com/webmaster-tools/competitive-analysis-tools.htm
.
Competitive intelligence can help influence
difficult business decisions, and can often help a company
gain a competitive advantage. Information is power,
and your competitors can use information about your
company to make decisions about their business.... and
you should too.
About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com
software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds
and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for
RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com
audio recording and editing software.
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copy of the issue or a link to any online posting would
be greatly appreciated send an email to sharon@notepage.net
.
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