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Competitive Intelligence capabilities are growing and improving. Information thought to be unavailable is now waiting to be collected and analyzed. The problem is knowing where to look, and how to find your needle in the "webstack".

New tools and new sources of information are added on a daily basis and it is hard to keep track of it. Meidata's experts have the knowledge of available tools and sources, and the creativity to develop new ways to meet customer demands.

Here we will present some of the advanced methods used to acquire information.

Online Presentations – A Window with Internal View

In the business environment, meetings, conferences and lectures are usually based on a presentation which leads the listeners through the subject’s highlights and graphically shows the bottom lines of the subject in matter. Presentations are also an easy-to-use tool for information using multiple media types (photos, text, charts, graphs and even videos) for personal use or to share with co-workers and clients.

Websites hosting photos, documents and videos have become the common channel for sharing information. Lately, websites hosting presentations are popping up and gradually becoming a wide-spread method for business oriented sharing. Toughened security makes sending big files by e-mail harder, thus uploading them turns out easier for most people.

In this medium, suppliers distribute marketing oriented data towards clients, co workers in international firms share information on joint projects, individuals use the hosting service to store personal information or show users external to the company what they are working on.

bloobble, SlideShare, MyPlick, SlideLive, Thumbstacks, scribd and other website based on a similar concept have popped up lately, encompassing a growing user base and larger variety of business segments.

Such sites host presentations about Future forecasts, Project status, marketing information, product descriptions and so many other types of priceless information, providing particularly intimate view to the internal processes of a company’s activity.

Sounds perfect, but there are several down sides:

• Search engines reach tags and names but do not go through presentation content
• Slides are not downloadable
• Most companies apply a strict confidentiality policy to prevent internal information from leaking to the open internet

These issues make finding interesting presentations a difficult and challenging task. Advanced searching skills and close familiarity with the medium are required to extract the maximum data from this semi-hidden source.

Our experts at Meidata have become masters of swift browsing and identification of valuable information in this ocean of presentations. contact us for more information on our methods.

Alinall, many interesting presentations find their way to these sharing sites, many of which allow an exclusive glance into internal company information, unparallel to press releases and unavailable in other sources.

Consumers Responses - How Can it Help in Competitive Intelligence

Nowadays, where information not only isn’t lacking, but surrounds us wherever we turn, willingly or not, one’s main concern seems to evolve around the challenge of selecting the valuable pieces of data. There’s a catch in the miracle of technology, though: we see everything and see nothing at all. The exact opposite of ignorance turns out to be ignorance itself, but of a more complex kind: in the preferable case - mixed with confusion, in the less desirable case – diluted in false confidence.

In simpler times in that aspect, the consumer would go to the store and make a choice between only a few products; and as part of the research beforehand, they would ask for experienced (post-purchase) acquaintances’ advice. Similar actions are made today, only bigger: going to the store becomes a mission of dealing with a blinding abundance of products, and asking for advice translates to visiting internet forums and reading consumers reviews and responses.

Such texts can serve as an anchor for potential consumers as for manufacturers, if wisely used. The explanation is simple: the confusion, the helplessness and the false confidence prior to the purchase, disappear once the product is bought. Consumers, who made the purchase, reveal the mystery – the good, the bad and the ugly – as they perceive it, to the benefit of their ‘co-consumers’ and manufacturers.

The inevitable questions remain:

Can we efficiently use consumers’ vague and informal texts as guidelines?

Are they reliable and motive-free?

Do they answer our questions?

First, the vagueness actually works as a benefit in this case. Specifics and coherent argumentations aren’t important here. The rawness of the texts is a part of their very essence - this is the user’s experience. It doesn’t need to be pretty nor professional; it has to be genuine.

Second, the single customer complaints, praises or wishes aren’t reliable, they are worthless and meaningless. However, hundreds of customers’ opinions are a whole different story (some of the voices might be partial, yet they are meaningless as fragments of a much bigger picture.).

And finally, sometimes these texts answer questions one might have, which is good. But very often they answer questions one didn’t think of raising, which is crucial. Being swamped with information, it gets harder to return to the basic mode of thinking which is grounded in the simple questions. Those questions and answers reveal themselves when consumers share every-day’s details of their user’s experience. That information is precious and unattainable in any other way.

While doing competitive intelligence research Meidata's exprerts are going through hundreds of user responses, and draw complaints, ideas and wishes of the consumer or user. This information shows the weaknesses and strengths of a certain brand, company or product, and can be part of a marketing plan and other strategic moves.

Please contact us and hear more about the way we do Competitive Intelligence

Track Changes in Your Competitor's Website

A company's website contains all of its products and services. An important part of the marketing is done through the website and reveals the company main strategy. It is very easy to draw information from this kind of sites because they are meant to deliver the information in the simplest way according to the target audience.

The first step of Competitive Intelligence when conducting a research on a competitor begins in the company website. Many types of information hide in the marketing pitches of the website.

The problem is what to do after the initial research is done. Surely, a new webpage with a new product is something we would like to know about. Even more simple changes such as new office in APAC can be very interesting. Changed text can imply on different view in marketing.

Tracking one company is easy, but if you have 5 competitors or more it gets tricky. It is a waste of time going everyday to each website and see what is new. We can not even notice minor, but important changes.

Exactly for that reason there are tools which help you monitor web pages and send you an alert when a change has been made. Some of the software are change detect, Orbiscope, detect change and more.

Meidata is using these tools as part of its ongoing monitor service. There are other ways to find out about upcoming products or changes a competitor is making, and Meidata is using every available tool and database to ensure you keep track on what is going on with your competitors.

Want to hear more?

Please contact us and start a competitive intelligence process in your organization

Competitive Intelligence from Internet Video Files

Video files are the black hole of Competitive Intelligence. There are 3 main problems when trying to extract information from video files:

1.    There is no real one Data Base for all the video files

2.    Searching is usually only on titles and tags and not on what is actually being said or displayed

3.    Scanning a video for the interesting part is much longer than scanning a document.

There are 3 different kinds of Video files that can be interesting: About the company, by the company and user generated content.

A video article on one of your competitors might include valuable interviews, pieces of information that are released to reporters and other interesting facts.

Videos released by the company usually reveal the marketing agenda, and the UVPs of the product.

User generated video content can say if customers are satisfied or even reveal confidential information about your competitor. In one of Meidata's projects we reached a video in Youtube that was taken by a customer of a high-tech telecom company. For 5 minutes the person filmed the interior of the exhibition hall reserved only for the company's customers. In other examples we provided customers saying very bad things about one of our client's competitors. Our client used it in his sales efforts.

We understand that video files are important but how do we solve our 3 problems.

1.    Know your video Database – for every line of business there are different websites. For example, in Telecom, one of Meidata's specialties, there are several sources for video files such as NetEvents

2.    The real content of the video is a real problem. The searches are mostly on tagging and titles. However, tools such as Blinkx try to search also on speech-to-text. Speech-to-Text solution, though not perfect, solves the problem

3.    Time consuming – this is a big problem, but who said Competitive Intelligence is easy…

Meidata is using video files for its researches and has the experience and knowledge to use the right Databases when necessary. Want to hear more, please contact us.