How to Use Social Bookmarking Websites For Competitor Intelligence
Bookmarking websites like Digg and del.
icio.
us can be good sources of competitor intelligence, although the competitor intelligence available is subtle and often indirect.
There are three main ways of extracting competitor intelligence from bookmarking websites: The first thing to do is to set up feeds and regular searches for relevant tags.
These can be competitor names, product names, employee names, facilities locations and so on.
You can do this manually but you can also use automatic monitoring software to let you check up on every instance of a competitor name, product names, etc.
An automated approach, rather than a manual approach, may be especially useful when your competitor is dealing with an emergency, and the tagging comes too thick and fast over a short period of time to follow manually.
Secondly, on some social bookmarking websites, you may be able to follow or subscribe to the tags of individual users.
This is useful if you can find the usernames of, for example, competitor employees.
That is not always easy - usernames may bear no resemblance to the employees' real names.
In some cases, you will have learnt over years of monitoring some of the aliases and preferred usernames of these key employees, and will be able to use those.
Thirdly, and most subtly, on some social bookmarking websites, you can monitor who has bookmarked particular stories.
And in those cases, you will be able to see what other stories those people have bookmarked.
This will give you information on what kind of people are interested in which of your competitor's activities.
For example, a story about a new mobile phone may have been bookmarked mainly by people who, from their other bookmarked stories, seem to be Java developers.
This level of competitor intelligence is difficult and laborious to process, but good competitor intelligence is all about being comprehensive in your intelligence gathering.
Bear in mind that social bookmarking websites differ greatly in their audience, type of stories that tend to be bookmarked, social attitudes and so on.
It will help if you understand the specific details of each bookmarking website that you follow.
Some good bookmarking websites to get you started are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.
icio.
us, Slashdot, Yahoo!, Buzz and FriendFeed.
icio.
us can be good sources of competitor intelligence, although the competitor intelligence available is subtle and often indirect.
There are three main ways of extracting competitor intelligence from bookmarking websites: The first thing to do is to set up feeds and regular searches for relevant tags.
These can be competitor names, product names, employee names, facilities locations and so on.
You can do this manually but you can also use automatic monitoring software to let you check up on every instance of a competitor name, product names, etc.
An automated approach, rather than a manual approach, may be especially useful when your competitor is dealing with an emergency, and the tagging comes too thick and fast over a short period of time to follow manually.
Secondly, on some social bookmarking websites, you may be able to follow or subscribe to the tags of individual users.
This is useful if you can find the usernames of, for example, competitor employees.
That is not always easy - usernames may bear no resemblance to the employees' real names.
In some cases, you will have learnt over years of monitoring some of the aliases and preferred usernames of these key employees, and will be able to use those.
Thirdly, and most subtly, on some social bookmarking websites, you can monitor who has bookmarked particular stories.
And in those cases, you will be able to see what other stories those people have bookmarked.
This will give you information on what kind of people are interested in which of your competitor's activities.
For example, a story about a new mobile phone may have been bookmarked mainly by people who, from their other bookmarked stories, seem to be Java developers.
This level of competitor intelligence is difficult and laborious to process, but good competitor intelligence is all about being comprehensive in your intelligence gathering.
Bear in mind that social bookmarking websites differ greatly in their audience, type of stories that tend to be bookmarked, social attitudes and so on.
It will help if you understand the specific details of each bookmarking website that you follow.
Some good bookmarking websites to get you started are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, del.
icio.
us, Slashdot, Yahoo!, Buzz and FriendFeed.
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