Using Revisit for competitive intelligence

Revisit is an online monitoring application that delivers live Twitter updates right onto your web browser, giving you numerous insights such as general interest towards selected topics, the volume of conversations about said topic as well as the frequency of these posts, all in one page.

What really sets Revisit apart from the crowd is the way it displays all this information: through a simple chart with a level of detail commonly seen in infographic diagrams.

Getting started with Revisit is easy; type in a search term (for example, the latest upcoming Apple product on the horizon), an optional ‘title’ for the chart and the maximum number of tweets you would like to track. You also have an option to display only tweets sent for the day itself. Once all three fields are filled in, just press enter and the data will start pouring in.

Each square shown on the chart represents one tweet, and they are arranged in lines that correspond to the time it was sent (relative to your time zone). If a bunch of tweets occur at the same period, they would be shown as grouped together on the chart. Users can also manipulate the chart by clicking around it, to get closer to the data. Clicking on an individual tweet will reveal the contents of the message, and any replies to it. 

Apart from the data shown on the chart, Revisit also takes the time to display some hard numbers above it, revealing the exact number of tweets, retweets and replies. It also features a ‘full screen’ mode, which is invaluable for displaying on a dedicated monitor or projector for constant surveillance.

So how can Revisit help you in terms of competitive intelligence? Its main strength is the ease in understanding its data. All the important bits are displayed in a simple layout that manages to communicate in several levels. Again, the comparison with infographic diagrams comes into mind here.

Because Twitter is one of the largest social media entities in the world today, it is possible to track any known corporate element with Revisit, like products, news and announcements, and even the personnel within a company.

Revisit as a service would be exponentially more powerful if it were to expand its range to include other social media services such as Facebook, but Twitter is unfortunately its first and final area of focus; you would need to seek out other tools if you wish to monitor them. In addition, the webpage is demanding in terms of processing power; the average computer may stumble if asked to track far more tweets than it can handle, so there is a bit of finesse involved.

There might be some minor shortcomings, but Revisit is an all-around excellent Twitter monitoring tool. That, coupled with the fact that it is completely free, is worth a try at the very least.

Is it impossible to stick to SCIP's code of ethics?

We have previously written about the vagueness of the SCIP code of ethics. Most items in that code are redundant because they are restatements of the law; or are they about promoting the profession rather than ethics itself. 

The most significant statement in the code is the third one:

To accurately disclose all relevant information, including one's identity and organization, prior to all interviews.

On the surface, this is pretty straightforward, but it is actually a difficult and unclear dictate, for several reasons:

1. "All relevant information": does this include the name of the client? That may be the most relevant information of all, certainly from the interviewee's point of view. It could also be argued that during the project, your real identity is not as a competitive intelligence vendor, but as a representative of the client. But you cannot reveal your identity because you probably promised confidentiality to the client (including through an NDA). 
2. Let us assume that you do not have to reveal the client name. So now we are allowed to keep back some information, what if you set up a subsidiary called the Institute of Business Benchmarking, and interview people under that alias - do you have to declare the Institute's real corporate ownership? If yes, how far does that go - do you have to reveal every detail of your corporate structure?
3. What is an "interview"? One must assume it means any probing interaction in a competitive intelligence project. Otherwise one can avoid this rule by separating formal interviews from conversations and other informal interactions. Does it include walking up to an exhibition booth? One would imagine that is in the spirit of the statement. Yet it cannot include general mystery shopping, which has a long pedigree in the greater market research industry. So now what if one walks up to an exhibition booth to buy something? Or just to assess how employees react, in the same way one might assess customer service in a mystery shopping exercise.
4. If an interview refers to all such interactions, how does it govern visiting competitor websites? Or scraping employee profiles on LinkedIn? Should you email them in advance? That is not a facile question, especially if you accept the website being just as important as a physical store presence. Even more so if the purpose of the competitive intelligence project is to assess that website itself (e.g. assess ease of use of AdWords). It is no excuse that the information on a website is public, because the SCIP rule does not limit itself to interviews about non-public information.
5. More intrusively, suppose you have to register on a website to download their promotional material. As an ordinary citizen, you would do that with a Hotmail-style email address, or a made-up one, to avoid being spammed. As a competitive intelligence analyst, must one act differently?

More philosophically, what is the purpose of revealing one's identity? The real ethical (or legal) issue is to not acquire information that the competitor wants to, and can expect to, keep confidential. That stands whether you reveal your identity or not. Revealing your identity does not raise/lower the bar about what should be confidential. The implication must be that, knowing your identity, the competitor's employee can assess what is confidential, but that is a fallacy. If the competitor's employee makes a mistake in assessing confidentiality, or you lure him into revealing more than he should, that is still a Bad Situation, regardless of your identity being known.

Aqute doesn't have the answers, just thorny questions. This one item is the backbone of the SCIP code of ethics and it is important for the statement to be clear and applicable. As it stands, it is a difficult sentence to interpret.

Using Follow That Page for competitive intelligence

Follow That Page is a free web service that helps track any changes in your preferred websites. It’s not unlike InfoMinder, a similar application which we reviewed last year, although there are some differences between the two.

Like InfoMinder, Follow That Page offers the ability to maintain and monitor a list of websites for changes and updates, as well as notify you when there are any. It might sound simple and basic, but it can be an excellent competitive intelligence tool if it’s used correctly.

Follow That Page notifies its users by sending email reports to them, detailing any changes made to the monitored webpages as soon as they are detected. The service does not discriminate in its data - any change in content is noted and highlighted, unless explicitly told to ignore by the user himself.

As a result, almost any information can be tracked, such as:

• Blog posts on corporate blogs and social media activity, where company announcements may be displayed
• New products and price updates listed in online catalogs
• Changes in the job listings page
• News updates regarding a popular product, or the company itself

One big advantage Follow That Page has over its peers is that its service is completely free. There is a ‘Pro’ version that offers a much higher update frequency (1000 daily checks as opposed to 100), but the free version of the service may likely be sufficient for most businesses looking for a cheaper alternative to other alternatives like InfoMinder, which charges a flat rate of $30 a year for its most basic package.

The e-mail generated reports are also a big plus for those who are constantly on the go, and do not have the time and patience to log in to a separate website for updates or open new attachments. Follow That Page skips all that by listing out the changes as plaintext in the e-mail itself, which keeps it lightweight and easily accessible within mobile devices.

That’s not to say that Follow That Page is a flawless application, however; there are a few unavoidable issues that any user may have to deal with on occasion.

Firstly, it is possible for the e-mail updates to get lost in the Spam folder occasionally. Getting them recognized as a trusted sender is simple enough, but it’s an unnecessary hassle either way.

The other minor flaw is that some webmasters may choose to disable access to the websites that one might want to monitor, effectively shutting out Follow That Page’s service. To be fair, Follow That Page asserts that any lists of tracked websites by their users are kept private, so it’s impossible for webmasters to willfully deny access to anyone.

In the competitive intelligence arsenal, Follow That Page is a basic web-monitoring service that does what it says on the tin, but little else. It’s a highly useful application suitable for any business, but those wishing for more features may want to look for other, more professional alternatives.

Competitive intelligence for Chinese clients: is it a good idea?

By now, we are all familiar with the idea of China as an economic superpower. It is the world's biggest trading nation and is on course to overtake the US as the world's leading economy. The data can be debated, particularly the importance of overall size vs per capita, but something big is happening.

The US remains the biggest market for competitive intelligence companies. There are more companies buying competitive intelligence, and they are spending more, than in any other country. Beyond the US, the size of a country's economy does not directly translate into competitive intelligence budgets. In our experience, for example, Japanese and French companies spend very little on competitive intelligence. But it is possible that Chinese companies may start to buy competitive intelligence services. As large, growing companies selling to new markets, they may do so in a big way.

Is this realistic? There are certain assumptions behind such an idea.

First, that outsourcing competitive intelligence is, or will become, a regular part of how Chinese companies do business. In the very different but slightly similar economy that is India, that has not happened. Indian companies rarely buy in competitive intelligence, certainly not from US or European companies. Likewise for the other major Asian economy, Japan.

Secondly, that Chinese companies would outsource to a non-Chinese consultant. Analyzing Asian competitors in Asia is probably best done by a local consultant. Even analyzing US and European companies could be equally well done by a local consultant who understands the Chinese client's history, language and culture better. It may also be that the Chinese government wants oversight of serious competitive intelligence being carried out by its leading companies and not allow such work to be outsourced to non-Chinese vendors.

Thirdly, and probably a minor consideration, that Chinese companies would want to use the techniques that US and European vendors use. It may be that China will place more reliance on electronic techniques. There are many anecdotal accounts of such activity, although limited real evidence. 

While there is interest in competitive intelligence among Chinese executives, it seems unlikely that demand from Chinese companies will overtake demand from US companies in the next couple of decades.

So much for realism, but should a US or European vendor take on Chinese clients, if the opportunity presents itself?

An interesting consideration is what the US might think of competitive intelligence companies working for Chinese clients. The US seems to get very nervous when considering the intelligence gathering of Chinese companies. Many of the applications of the Economic Espionage Act seem to relate to Chinese activities. Chinese companies can fall foul of US suspicions, even in the absence of solid evidence. Taking on Chinese clients may make a competitive intelligence vendor less palatable to US companies, regardless of how legally and ethically the vendor may behave. Assuming that most competitive intelligence vendors rely heavily on US clients, what the US might think of a Chinese client list needs to be considered.

Such suspicions may mellow over time, of course, perhaps to coincide with a time when Chinese companies are ready to use external vendors for competitive intelligence.

For now, having Chinese clients for competitive intelligence remains a limited scenario. But, as with most things Chinese, it will be interesting to follow developments.

An eBay for competitive intelligence

Some of our earlier posts about InfoArmy got us thinking about disruption in the competitive intelligence industry. InfoArmy may not be disruptive (many of the reactions to those blog posts suggested they were not considered serious challengers). But the broader point about disruption remains, particularly given the current vogue to tell clients that they must self-disrupt or die. 

Back in the sixteenth century, we wrote about useless competitive intelligence. An eagle-eyed analyst sees competitive intelligence almost everywhere he looks. Unfortunately, most of it is of little commercial value: the company that might want that information is not a client, or the information is irrelevant in some other way.

But what if there was a vast online marketplace for competitive intelligence fragments: an eBay, to make the unimaginative comparison. Marketplaces have disrupted the online advertising industry, for example. With a competitive intelligence eBay, any time someone found a piece of information related to a company's competitor, they could post it on there. They would tag it with company names, category and the like. And price it, say $10, or $100. Or perhaps using an auction format.

Some instances of where such information might come from:

• An analyst is doing some online research about Oracle's distribution network, and finds out tangentially who handles IBM's logistics. This is of no relevance to the client or the project, so they post it on this marketplace for $20.
• A student goes to interview at Twitter's offices, and sees Microsoft's M&A team walking out. He sells this information on the marketplace for $50.
• My mother lives opposite the Boeing factory, and notices that this week they have had a lot more deliveries than usual. She lists this for sale, for $10.
• Someone sitting at Pret-A-Manger deduces their quarterly sales from the success of their Christmas Appeal. Stick that on the marketplace for $30.

The details would have to be thought out (as usual). For example, listings would have to hint at the information - you couldn't give it all away right there in the listing. Feedback ratings would temper the temptation to oversell the value of information, but actually information could be difficult to price: how do you determine a price that attracts the seller and satisfies the buyer, especially if you don't know who will buy the information and find it useful. Perhaps some mechanism would be needed to prevent companies selling misinformation about themselves.

Perhaps the most difficult issues would be verifiability and ethics. Verifiability could be incorporated into the feedback rating (when rating a seller, assess whether the information was correct), or it could be made less important by the low cost of the information. Ethics could be a more intractable issue. If the marketplace was truly successful, it could tempt unregulated people to wander the nation seeking intelligence in unethical ways (sure, the whole industry is unregulated, but professional competitive intelligence analysts are born with an innate sense of ethics that never lets them stray). Even well-meaning sellers may not know how to determine whether information was properly acquired. 

Could this work?