CI and car washes
As I go through the process of collecting web references to competitive intelligence for the news section of the SCIP website, I see competitive analysis mentioned as a valuable activity for a wide variety of fields. For instance, over the past two weeks these areas have included human resources, risk management, product managers, law firms, sales organizations, mystery shopping, media monitoring, reputational positioning, news analysis, and customer relationship management.
What I didn’t quite expect was the entry I found today: a session at the International Car Wash Association’s annual conference titled: “Why a competitive analysis will save your business.” On second thought, the appearance of this session is not that unusual – I regularly see references to writings that emphasize the need for entrepreneurs, start ups, and small businesses to apply competitive intelligence to their strategic planning.
CI is not the exclusive activity of Fortune 500 companies. Any organization, including non-profits and government entities, must understand and look out for changes in their external environment that can affect their ability to successfully reach their goals.
LinkedIn company search
Last year LinkedIn released its company search feature. After a year in Beta, I looked at what it provides that could be of interest to competitive intelligence practitioners.
To start, first Click on the “companies” heading at the top of the LinkedIn page, and you are offered the opportunity to find companies by keyword (can also limit search by country or postal code), by company name, or by industry. You can also get there by clicking on the company name in a person’s LinkedIn record.
Once you’ve identified the company you want to look at, LinkedIn gives you a short description of the company and employee information:
- How many of their employees are on Linked in and a list of their names, titles, and locations from those individual entries. (Provides you a potential list of contacts, locations where the company has a facility, and the types of activities at a location as extrapolated from the titles.)
- A list of their new hires, LinkedIn users who have indicated in their profile that they’ve recently joined this company. List includes their current title, their previous company and title, and how long ago they were hired. (Potential source of information on companies they left, an indication of specific movement from another company, the rate at which the company is hiring new people, and the specific knowledge base of the new hires.)
- Recent promotions and changes, LinkedIn users who have recently indicated in their profile that they’ve recently changed positions at this company. List includes their current and previous titles, and when the change took place. (Where’s the growth aread in the company, potential dissolution of a specific department and replacement of those individuals in another part of the company.)
- Popular profiles of Linkedin users who are highlighted because they may be actively in the news, referenced in blogs, participating in industry groups, and/or frequently the result of searches and other activities within the Linkedin network. (Identify the ‘movers and shakers’ of the organization.)
A section titled “related companies” also provides additional information:
- A link to any division or subsidiary company record in LinkedIn. (company organization)
- Common career paths for the company’s employees – companies they came from and companies they left to. (Companies working in similar areas, potential competitors.)
- A list of companies that the company employees are most connected to. (People they know and talk to.)
The key statistics box gives you a variety of background information on the company.
- The locations of the company and how many employees with LinkedIn profiles are at each location.
- The headquarters address.
- Type of company (public/private).
- Company size.
- Last years reported revenue.
- When the company was founded.
- The URL for the company website.
- If available, a link to articles on the company in the popular business press.
- Common job titles and percentage of employees in each one.
- The top school employees attended
- The media age of employees
- Employee gender split in percentages
A handy box titled “Jobs” lists how many open positions in the company has posted on LinkedIn, a link to a list of those jobs, and then a link to each position’s details. A “news about” section provides titles, sources, and dates for the most recent three articles on the company, with a link to each one. And if the company is public, the page shows basic stock prices.
Think six degrees of corporate separation on steroids. Of course, accuracy is an issue when it comes to the data gathered from LinkedIn profiles, and most of the information and statistics are derived from those people profiles.
LinkedIn has a 3 minute video demo of the company profiles on their company profile page at http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/03/20/company-profile/ . This page also includes an interesting overview on how you find company profiles, and relevant people information modules.
The need for change
Upcoming issues of Competitive Intelligence magazine will contain articles and columns concerning CI’s ability to evolve and survive in the current economic climate. A recent post in a law blog on how legal firms are having to face their own dramatic rate and pace of change.
Laura Walters used the framework of the book, Who Moved My Cheese?, to provide a perspective on how to react to change. Here are paraphrased excerpts from her blog entry that equally apply to competitive intelligence and my comments on them:
1. Anticipate change. “The nature of a service industry is to operate on a fairly reactive basis – our clients drive what we do. But clients expect their service providers to be proactive, not reactive. A proactive approach to most anything beats a reactive approach 99% of the time.”
CI is essentially a service/staff department and the natural tendency is to focus our energy on responding to our client demands. But time and again experienced CI professionals emphasize the need to provide ‘early warning,’ bringing issues to the attention of decision-makers before they reach the critical stage when the only option is to react to them.
2. Control your activities. “Being proactive in our business model and operations also allows for employees to feel more in control of their environment. No one enjoys being a firefighter all the time.”
In CI the quickest means to burnout is continually operating in the firefighter mode. Creating an environment where you are the change orchestrator not only shows your skills and value to decision-makers, but it’s also a much nicer place to live.
3. Monitor change. “Proactive strategies are the result of knowing your market, your clients, and your industries inside and out.”
CI practitioners’ positions in their organization and their particular focus on what is happening outside the company often uniquely positions themselves to notice the first alert on change. Decision-makers not only need to know what change is coming, but how the organization as a whole can proactively adjust to optimally prepare for that change.
4, Adapt to change quickly. “Adapting to change is key to long-term success. Noticing small changes early helps you adapt to bigger changes later on. Adapting to a quickly changing marketplace means acting even more quickly”
Too often CI outputs and schedules are set in stone, and their production is keyed to the calendar or major events. Remaining alert to small shifts and reporting them as they arise can be critical to being better positioned when all those small changes roll into one large one. As Joe Goldberg mentioned in a recent presentation, the critical trend facing intelligence is speed.
Essential guide to social media
Every once in a while my scanning blogs comes up with interesting sources and texts that I didn’t even knew existed, yet alone knew enough about to search for. On one of the PR blogs that occasionally mentions CI was a link to an e-book called “The Essential Guide to Social Media” by Brian Solis. This 20 page online e-book refers to itself as “an executive outline of Social Media tools and resources needed to listen and participate, guiding PR, customer service, production development and marketing.”
What I found interesting was its approach to social media through the business lens. It takes a social sciences approach to social media, and points out ways that they need to be engaged to work for you properly. The author emphasizes how the standard business approach has to be modified to work in this environment. The full document is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/3283966/The-Essential-Guide-to-Social-Media
The Scribd.com site itself is worth spending some time at. From its ‘about us’ page:
Scribd is the place where you publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents. We built a technology that’s broken all barriers to traditional publishing and in the process also built one of the largest readerships in the world. With Scribd’s iPaper document reader, anyone can easily upload and immediately share their original works on Scribd.com or any other website. iPaper transforms PDF, Word, PowerPoint and many other file formats into an elegant web display.
Although the majority of material is in the ‘wannabe novelist’ category, a search on “competitive intelligence” yielded some well-constructed papers and marketing presentations. Worth a look.