Poll results: social media and competitive intelligence.
You may recall that we ran a little poll — on the Hoover’s front page and on this blog — asking “Does your business use social media for competitive intelligence?” Here are the results we got:
Caveats as we head into the analyis:
- No, the results aren’t scientific, because we didn’t normalize for region, industry, size of firm, et cetera.
- You think this would be a pretty savvy audience, what with its members’ being readers of this blog, users of Hoover’s, or both. :)
It’s heartening that the largest category here is of people who do use social media for competitive intelligence. People are out there on blogs and Twitter and forums and whatnot, talking about you and your competitors and your industry — so why not listen to them and harness the information and opinions they’re sharing?
The 21% who use social media, but not for competitive intelligence, have an easy opportunity in front of them: they can build on their current use of these channels for marketing or customer support or whatever, begin using some simple tools (as laid out in the talk I gave a little while back on this subject), and easily enrich their understanding of their competitive space. Good.
The folks who said “No” have a HUGE opportunity in terms of both social media and competitive intelligence. They can take the steps just outlined to improve their CI, but also take advantage of social-media channels to communicate better with their audience(s). As I’ve said before, not every social-media tool will fit every company; some CEOs, for example, would make horrible bloggers. But any company that wants to hear more from its users and talk more openly with the world ought to explore the benefits that social media might bring them — including the CI benefits.
I worry about those who clicked “What is competitive intelligence?” Maybe they do it — monitor what’s going on in their competitive space — without realizing that there’s a formal name and professional discipline around it. Maybe they’re small-business owners who are utterly tapped in to their local or niche market, so much so that they don’t need to think of CI as a separate function. I hope that’s it, because the idea that companies are wandering around not paying attention to the competitive arena in which they operate . . . that just scares me.
How would YOU interpret these results?
~
Related:
~
Category: Social mediaIf you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed so you can receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.
3 Comments so far
Leave A Comment
Tim, I suspect that if you rephrased it to ask “do you care what your competitors are doing and would you change your course if you knew their actions and the market’s responses to them?” the answer would be unequivocally “yes” in which case that 33% would be more like a 73%.
I believe that early adopters of social media have raised even higher protective walls and many have stuck to the mantra that they’re just using social media socially or that they are there independent of their competitors. Although I am an early adopter, I’m not buying it… if the same crowd asked if they were using social media for any professional reason whatsoever, they would answer yes. In that “yes” is an inherent care for competitive advantage otherwise the time would never have been invested.
**in full disclosure, I did take this poll and indicated that I use social media for competitive intelligence (although I use it for a myriad of other reasons).
You raise interesting points, Lani. I would call attention to the cross-section of people we polled, though: even though we didn’t scientifically control for age, industry, etc., we weren’t polling just people active on Twitter, for instance. While I agree with you that any business use of *anything* potentially speaks to the quest for competitive advantage, I wonder how many of the respondents to this poll would regard themselves as sophisticated business users of social media?
I’m willing to bet that many users don’t indicate that they are using social media for anything but personal use but if you analyze their use, their profiles typically indicate their career which inadvertently puts them in the “business user” category.
You’re right though, many wouldn’t consider themselves sophisticated or savvy but the cool thing is that many are more savvy than they actually realize, even if by accident.