SPYING ON THE COMPETITION

Knowing what your competition is doing, knowing what people are saying about your competition, and knowing how people feel about your competition are at least as important as knowing those things about your own company. Your company will live or die on its ability to outmaneuver, outthink, and outposition the competition, and blogs will help you do that like no other tool (except perhaps bribing competing officials, which I don’t advocate). The first rule of thumb is that for every search you run on yourself and your business, you should run a mirror search on your competition. If you want to know how much people love the Corvette, you’d better know how much people love the Mustang as well. If you want to know how much people love having WiFi in your coffee shop, you’d better know what the trendsetters think of WiFi in all coffee shops.

Consider the following when spying on your competition:

• Watch them like a hawk. This means knowing as much about what the blogging world is saying about them as you can. Search for every mention of their company names, for example, and have those results returned to you daily as a PubSub feed.

• Know how they compare to you. The statistical analysis you do weekly or monthly as part of knowing what people think about you is important, but knowing those same things about your competitors is an important leading indicator.

• Know what customers expect out of your competition. Often times, customers will be begging for new features, innovations, and so forth. Apple Computer users have, for example, begged for a G5 (Apple’s most powerful processor) laptop for years. Knowing this allows Apple’s competitors to position their laptops as being “powerful enough for those who want a G5.”

Watching your competition like a hawk can be a challenge, but it can also be uniquely rewarding. One company with which I consult actually ended up starting a blog that cataloged all the information they were gleaning. As a result, many of their competitors’ fans and passionate advocates began coming to this new blog to talk about why they loved the company. The net result was that they had more information on their competitors’ most valuable customers than their competitors did. Having the information on your competitors and their customers, and knowing what to do with that information, are two very different things. First, of course, you can make comparisons: how many people talk about your competitor on a given day versus how many talk about you, and how does that trend map on a dayto- day and week-to-week graph? Are they getting more popular than you? Did they get a larger response after the last tradeshow? Do people more readily compare them to another valuable brand? Do they compare your two companies side-by-side? All of these types of questions are important, and properly researching your competitors will prepare you to answer them. Running searches on your company name and their company name will show you all blog posts containing both names, which is an important thing to see; it will tell you, for example, which products or company customers believe is of greater value, is more desirable, and is more “buzzworthy.” Overall, the tools you use to watch your competitors are feedbased systems such as PubSub and Feedster, active search systems such as Technorati and BlogPulse, and any other “creative” means (such as setting up a fan site for your competition) that you may start. Each of these will yield different types of results and should, therefore, be responded to appropriately.

THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRY

Knowing what people think about you, your company, and your products is important, and knowing what they think about your competitors and their products is crucial, but just as important as either of these is knowing what people think about your industry. People, in this case, can be analysts, industry experts, prominent figures, and leaders in the industry, all the way down to the regular folk who actually keep you employed by buying your products and services. Determining where the whole industry is going requires that you listen to all of these levels of voices. You can subscribe to industry leaders’ blogs (industry analysts, for example, love starting blogs, probably because they love seeing their words in print); for others, you may need to do searches. Look in the following five places for industry information to get you a good idea where your industry is going:

• Analyst blogs These are a gold mine. Successful analysts are actually quite smart. The folks at Jupiter Research, for example, host a number of successful blogs, including analyst blogs like David Card (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch .com/analysts/card/) and Joe Wilcox (http://weblogs .jupiterresearch.com/analysts/wilcox/); industry blogs such as Media (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/toplevel/archives/ cat_media.html), Marketing (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch .com/toplevel/archives/cat_marketing.html), and Commerce (http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/toplevel/archives/cat_ commerce.html); as well as a blog by Jupiter Media CEO Alan Meckler (http://weblogs.jupitermedia.com/meckler/).

• Press release wire services All of the major press release wire services supply feeds these days. As a result, you can either subscribe to all press releases for an industry or you can search on the feeds. Because press releases are so popular, PubSub allows you to search specifically on press releases, and it automatically filters out all other content (www .pubsub.com/pressreleases.php). You can also do this with blogs (www.pubsub.com/weblogs.php) or even newsgroups (www.pubsub.com/newsgroups.php). Heck, you can even search based on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings to stay truly on top of your industry (www .pubsub.com/edgar.php).

• Industry blogs While finding industry-defining blogs can be a bit of a challenge (you’ll likely need to poke around a little bit in blogrolls of bloggers who write on your industry), subscribing to overall industry news, information, and insider details saves you a lot of time and effort. In reality, a successful feed, search, and blog system means you likely won’t have to read the newspaper to get this information unless of course you want to.

• Feed searches Try to do smart searches on PubSub or Feedster for terms that define your industry. You want to get an overall, high-level view of where your industry is at on a day-to-day as well as big-picture level.

• Yahoo! News feeds Finding out specifically what’s new day-to-day can be a challenge.

Most people rely heavily on the newspaper, TV, or radio for this. Thankfully, you can also get your news delivered via a feed. Efforts are underway to let you download news to your MP3 player and then have it read back to you (like a radio show). Yahoo! News provides all of its news as feeds, including specific industries and categories, and it offers the capacity to search the news for specific keywords and have those articles returned to you as a feed (just as Feedster does). You can access Yahoo! News feeds at http://news.yahoo.com/rss . Searching your industry, like searching for your company name, can provide a wealth as well as an overabundance of information, which is why you need to start small, limiting your individual searches until they are relevant and useful, and then build on that. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself having to sift through quite literally thousands of results every day, which doesn’t help you or your company make smart decisions. You may choose to work with a blog consulting company or a media clipping company that specializes in blogs to create summaries of these for you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. If you are able to do this yourself, having a hands-on view of your industry, competitors, and your company is invaluable; however, make sure it doesn’t bury you in information. Being aware and being productive can sometimes be two very different things.