What is the link between Competitive Intelligence and Social Media?

[Khalid Dalil]

Social media is unaided, real, unprompted, wild. It starts the
second you launch your brand and doesn't stop until your brand dies. Competitive Intelligence it's a systemic and ethical information processing
discipline that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources
and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence to support decision and policy makers.

[Vivek Raghuvanshi]

Khalid bhai,

Eid Mobarek.

This is how I interpret and interweave Competitive Intelligence and Social Media:

http://corporaterisks.info/blog/?p=685


Social Media Tracking and Analytics Tools in Competitive Intelligence:

1. Social Mention

2. Bit.ly

3. SocialToo

4. Twitteranalyzer

5. Xinureturns

6. Tweetstats

7. Twitalyzer

8. BlogPulse

9. PostRank

10. Broadtracker

Social Media tools to monitor what others talk about your company:

1. Digg
2. Delicious
3. Technorati
4. Google blog search
5. Google trends
6. Google alerts

Types of Social Media:

1. Forums and Groups
2. Podcasts
3. Microblogging
4. Content Communities
5. Wikis
6. Blogs
7. Social Networks

[monica nixon]

Hi Khalid,

RE: Whats the link between Competitive Intelligence and Social Media?

Let me start by saying I worked for a small start up to help develop a business plan around their sophisticated SW components and their associated capabilities- ie; semantic indexing, demographic profiling, concept clustering, sentiment analysis. Certainly, one of the opportunities is to package these pieces and parts into a comprehensive solution to monitor the web/social media for various types of insight.

That said, right now there are a variety of solutions on the market for social media monitoring. Most of them fall under the domain of "Brand Monitoring Platforms" while some others are referred to as "Listening Platforms." Typically, the brand monitoring solutions report on news and conversations, but lack much in the way of analytics to turn the information into actionable insight. The Listening Platforms tend to incorporate text mining and analytics and go a bit further into producing meaningful insights. Suffice it to say however, the Listening platforms are still in their infancy. Some of the key vendors/solutions are Nielsen with Buzz Metrics, TNS with Cymphony, Dow Jones' Insight, Visible Technologies TruView/TruCast and Biz 360.

Ok, so getting back to your main question, what can these tools really do and provide and what is the link with CI? Well, my professional opinion is at present, they are more of a tool for current product marketing, MR/MI, advertising/brand management and PR- to enable crisis response if bad things are being said, to measure share of voice and how a new product is being received,etc. So, as it relates to CI, well mostly applicable for the tactical CI/competitive response folks focused on current products.....

So then what about the aforementioned solution's applicability to Strategic CI? Well, not so much. But wait, there are some other firms out there doing some pretty interesting stuff leveraging the collective web, social media for strategic early warning (SEWS). A lot of this activity is focused on early pandemic warning, bio-terrorism, predicting ecological change,risk management-protecting people/facilities, and yes, for national security and defense purposes - predicting terrorist attacks...cool stuff look up Google INSTEDD,GPHIN, Veratect.....so yes, collective intelligence is coming along enabled in part by social media tools...

Regards,
Monica