More of my thoughts on social media and competitive intelligence.
Because I know you want even more of them. (Right? Right?) The delightful Erin Lindholm of Frost & Sullivan saw the SCIP presentation I gave this spring and then interviewed me to get more of my thoughts on how companies can use social media to harvest competitive intelligence. The fruits of our Q&A are available in this PDF document — here’s a teaser:
In the past, we had well-established communications channels that we understood pretty well — television, print media, et cetera. These might compare to chess pieces: the interactions between the pieces are highly complex, but you can learn the basic moves of the pieces in five minutes.
But what do we see today? Constant evolution of platforms, channels and styles of communications. It’s as though the different chess pieces are adding wrinkles to their moves every few turns, or having certain moves taken away from them. I think that this reality requires us to have a more fluid approach, which means staying open to the new channels that arise, and reexamining our basic assumptions regularly.
Please do give it a read and let me (and Erin) know what you think. Oh, and while you’re at it, you might like to look over the rest of Frost’s current eBulletin on Competitive Intelligence.
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I loved this! 12 years ago, I was doing competitive intelligence for a private subscription newsletter to defense contractors (RFP intel, new developments in procurement reform, other competitor scuttlebutt). I worked primarily via CompuServe, BB-sites, & used (a little) Mozilla as a browser.
Wow. How far we’ve come in such a short time. Scary.
It is scary, Elaine — but not as scary, to me, as all the missed opportunities passing by the many CI practitioners (whatever the job title) who are failing to use all the good online/social-media sources at their disposal.
[...] may remember that last week I pointed to an interview on social media and competitive intelligence that I did for a Frost & Sullivan newsletter. Shortly after that, I saw a nice note about the [...]