Let’s Talk Knowledge

As I mentioned previously, Twitter is becoming a more relevant source for competitive intelligence. Not necessarily as a standalone source, but a nice complement to traditional sources. One of the great things about Twitter is the number of third party tools that have been developed to help you get the most out of the service. In this post, I wanted to share some thoughts on how I use TweetDeck, one of my personal favorites, for CI.

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to give an all encompassing tutorial of TweetDeck. If you’d like one of those, there are plenty of good ones out there. What I am trying to do is give some insight on how the tool can help you filter the huge amount of content flowing through the Twitter service to get information that is relevant for your competitive intelligence purposes.

There are a couple of basics when it comes to using TweetDeck. First is the concept of columns. Columns are a way to get different views of the the information streaming from Twitter. There are a lot of ways to filter a TweetDeck column. As in my last post, I’ll break it down by three different categories: People, Companies, Topics/Products.

I’ll start with people. Following people on Twitter recently got easier with the advent of Lists. You can create a list in Twitter of the people that you want to follow. These of course can include executives from a company you’re tracking, people who often comment on a company or topic your tracking, etc. Once your Twitter lists are created, TweetDeck can quickly create a column based on one of them. You can also create a column in TweetDeck based on a search. With respect to people, you can simply search for the @ mention of the user (for example @marcbenioff). This will allow you to see the things people are saying to a particular person on Twitter, and a great way to understand what topics a person is discussing or directed towards that person by the masses on Twitter.

For companies the process is much the same as people. You can create a list in Twitter that follows the people, products, and company feeds associated with a particular company. For example a Twitter list for SalesForce might include @marcbenioff, @salesforce, @joywang (social media analyst that often comments on salesforces adoption of social media). You may also want to create a column that is based on a search, again using Salesforce as an example you may want to create a column based on hashtags and or keywords (“#salesforce OR salesforce”). This will get you all the other mentions of a company name.

The same process used for companies can be followed for products or topics. Find the people that often talk about a particular product or topic, as well as create a search for mentions of the product name or topic.

Once you have your columns created in TweetDeck, you can now start using some of the powerful tools and analytics that that are part of the solution. At the bottom of each column in TweetDeck there is a row of buttons. One of my favorites is the “Cloud” button. By clicking this, you can quickly get a cloud tag of the most popular things being mentioned in that column. That includes keywords, links, twitter usernames, and hashtags. Great way to do some high level analytics and get a quick picture of what you need to know about what is happening right now.

Next is the “Filter” tag. This will allow you to filter a column by text, time, source, or name. For example, we could filter the SalesForce product column by the word “performance”, allowing you to see anything related salesforce.com performance.

There are also options to mark everything in the column as seen, thereby cleaning up the column entirely, or just cleaning up the entries you have actually seen.

These are just some of the ways TweetDeck can help Twitter become a more useful tool for competitive intelligence. Just to reiterate, I think Twitter is a great part of any CI monitoring strategy. Especially with respect to the conversation that is currently happening around the people, companies, and products or topics you are following.

If you have any other helpful hints with respect to TweetDeck, please do share!

- Ken

kens Research, Social Media CI, Competitive Intelligence, TweetDeck, twitter

The analyst firm Outsell published an interesting report (you’ll find it here. Sorry about the paywall, but we in the premium content biz have to hang together …  ) this week on the narrowing of the technological generation gap in the enterprise. Interesting, because it indicates that the three generational groups we now see coexisting in the workplace (Millennials, Generation X & Baby Boomers) are now converging in their use of technology and level of information savvy. As the report notes, “It is [now] not safe to generalize about younger people vs. older people when it comes to information habits and preferences.”  Their analysis concludes, in other words, that most workers—regardless of age—are using capabilities like Web searching, information alerting, email and mobile solutions in about the same way.

I agree with Leigh Watson, the report’s author, that this is good news for enterprises, as it means that we can ease up on some of the handwringing we’ve all been going through lately about how to reconcile these seemingly disparate information technology users internally, and how those of us in the information solutions business can create products to meet all their needs. As the report concludes, the problem seems to be taking care of itself. Right?

Well, maybe partially, but I think there’s an aspect of this gap that still exists, and is even more important for us close, and that’s the different ways in which Millennials (who, as Brigitte noted a couple of weeks ago, are newly entering the workforce today) approach knowledge sharing as an integral part of both their personal and professional lives. Speaking broadly, this generation of users has tightly integrated social networks into their daily lives, and they’re often using those networks not only to socialize, but to gather knowledge. They do it through peer-to-peer sharing via a community rather than through a solo hunting and gathering activity—which can mean a diminished reliance on traditional research tools. Ken referred to this as ‘Social Intelligence’ when he wrote about it back in April.

It‘s an example of The Strength of Weak Ties, and how finding connections outside your own area best stimulates innovation. Leveraging large social networks of weak ties to share and collect information changes the way people gain knowledge. Rather than finding and synthesizing vast amounts of information, they collaborate with subject matter experts, and then validate and extend what they have already learned. This has profound implications for us information providers, who will need to find ways to integrate with and into the social networks, or perhaps more importantly, to leverage the underlying capabilities and standards developed by the networks, to maintain their presence in front of potential users.

It could also indicates a perhaps more profound change under way in user behavior that is an outcome of both the social networking and self-serve information markets. That is: a move away from the notion that research is an activity that is best built on lessons of the past, toward more of an in-the-moment activity that looks for similar experiences. With the immediacy of the internet to connect people who share similar questions or concerns, we could see researchers move away from the notion of finding someone who previously answered the question and instead finding someone who is also asking the same question. If this change takes hold and sticks around, research tools will be less valued than community tools, and will have to evolve themselves to support this need.

And that brings us back around to the technological generation gap. Although use of social networks by Baby Boomers has increased significantly in recent years, young people still have significantly higher rates of use. But even more important than the tool that social networks are, is the different way of managing information that they represent. Even if older generations of users like the Gen Xers (such as me) and Baby Boomers are closing the gap on the use of electronic information tools, it will be more interesting to see if we can close the gap in leveraging the actual networks behind those tools and make those weak ties work to our advantage in the enterprise.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts, so let me know if you’re seeing examples of how people are beginning to use those networks of weak ties in their business lives (the use of networks like LinkedIn to prospect for jobs during the downturn is one obvious example).

-Ryan

ryanw Information Management, Research, Social Media

I am just back from the KM/ West 2009. Somehow I did not feel the energy and buzz I was expecting. The exhibition floor was reasonably busy, but it seemed at times that most people stopping by where looking for a contracting project or trying to sell some new search engine.

Enterprise 2.0 and all the enabling technologies and tools were still a big part of the exhibition and conference streams. I heard some interesting talks on communities, Share Point and “best practice” intranets… Some parallel meetings with customers confirmed an increasing interest in dashboards and visualizations on portals, intranets and extranets. Netvibes, which has been for a long time my preferred widget based personal home page (until I switched to iGoogle because for a while, I found loading my page was far too slow…) are positioning themselves with a new B2B offering . Our Dow Jones Executive Dashboard offering is also worth mentioning in that space. To know more, check our recent press release.

Unsurprisingly, Enterprise 2.0 has become pretty mainstream and “taken for granted”, and was an expected reference to each and every discussion on the various conference streams. A related theme which seems to be attracting a lot of energy is the concept of “communities of practice”. Finding experts, colleagues “who have done it before” or simply other professionals to bounce ideas off and collaborate with in my Enterprise or beyond, covering concepts of targeted expert sourcing and broad crowdsourcing .

I have just been listening to a recent interview (©McKinsey & Company, registration is free to listen to the interview or get a transcript of the interview) from McAfee (who was also a keynote speaker at KM) who speaks about….Web 2.0 and his new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organization Toughest Challenges.

One of the “tough challenges” McAfee talks about is in fact the location of expertise across complex organizations and he gives the example of the US Intelligence Community, with a “huge sprawling bureaucracy of 16 federal agencies”, having successfully built simple Web 2.0 tools where people could share what they do and know. As McAfee points out, those tools can also be leveraged to share what you do not know, to locate expertise, find guidance, and avoid reinventing the wheel which tends to happen in large and decentralized organizations.

Another aspect related to intelligence communities worth mentioning is the entry of Generation Y into the workforce. I often reflect with customers and colleagues around Generation Y expectations and some new behaviors around creating, searching, finding and sharing information. Specifically, the fact that, for those young professionals, the most trusted and authoritative source of information is peer to peer networks and conversations is I think a profound shift for the business information world. It is a trend I really find fascinating and which increasingly we are looking at embracing in some of our future developments.

Brigitte Ricou-Bellan

Brigitte Social Media Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Generation Y, Knowledge-Management

Using Twitter as a research tool for competitive intelligence has already become credible, and it is rapidly becoming crucial. Twitter is a great place to find unfiltered, unembargoed competitive intelligence. When I think about CI using Twitter, there are a three key areas to think about:

• People: Often you can find mid to senior level people from your competitors on twitter. You’d be amazed at some of the things they may tweet about their company or its products & services.
• Products: Great place to find information about weaknesses, strengths, potential new releases and features, etc.
• Companies: A lot of information on Twitter about companies in general. Watch for tweets about company direction and focus, customer service attitude, etc. A companies presence (or lack thereof) on Twitter will also often be an indicator of how they may be trying to use Social Media as part of their strategy overall.

There are actually quite a few tools that have been launched to help you monitor and analyze the twitter conversation around these things. I’ll actually try and list some of those in a separate blog post. In this post I will just focus on using the twitter.com interface to do that.

The Twitter Search functionality is the place to start. Here you can search the twitter stream for people, products, companies, or references to a specific topic. There are options to restrict your searches to those containing links, or those that have a positive or negative attitude. The hashtag concept is particularly powerful when following a particular product or topic. Simply put a ‘#’ symbol in front of the product name you are interested in. You can also save these searches for quick reference in the future. For example, I have a saved search for #factiva that I check daily, just to see what people are saying about one of Dow Jones’ products.

Once you’ve run a twitter search, you can start examining the results. You should start by checking the profiles of some of the people that have posted relevant results. You can find a lot of valuable information from these profile pages. First, you can get an indicator of credibility by the number of people following that individual. Second, you can see how much information you are likely to get by following that person, based on the number of tweets they have posted, as well as a quick scan of their recent posts for quality and relevance. You can also take a look at who that person is following. This may help you find other subject matter experts on a particular topic/product. Twitter has released a new feature called ‘Lists’ that makes this even easier. Twitter allows people to create lists of people they follow, thus creating a categorization mechanism. Check these lists to see if they have already done the hard work of identifying other relevant individuals to follow.

Once you have found the right people to follow, you can create your own lists, and start monitoring the tweets for relevant information. While Twitter may not be the most relevant source of CI, especially depending on the industry your in, it can be a great way to get otherwise hard to find nuggets of information. It certainly is one of the best ways to understand the conversation around your competition as well. I’ll try to write some posts in the future about the tools that are out there, which can greatly streamline the process of using Twitter for CI.

How are you using Twitter for CI? Any tips or best practices you’d like to share?

- Ken

Ken Sickles Research, Social Media Competitive Intelligence, Research, Social Media, twitter

I mentioned in my last post that a shift in focus will be taking place in technology. Instead of creating, storing, distributing, and retrieving (as my friend Christine pointed out), technology will turn its focus to tools to help make sense of the vast amounts of valuable information made available to us. I wonder though if it isn’t the simplest of technologies, which already exists, that will be one of the most beneficial to us.

What could be better than a tool that would understand what decision point we are trying to support, go find all of the relevant information, then analyze it and present it in an easily consumable manner like a dashboard? How about someone who has recently made the same or similar decision? Someone who has already either manually or through technology synthesized large amounts of information, understands the sources of the most valuable data, and maybe even knows the context in which you are making a decision.

Learning from the knowledge of others is something we’re very accustomed to doing, and very comfortable with. Really, the idea of Search is to connect us to the materials that others have put together, so we can benefit from the knowledge they posses without knowing who they are. But now, we have social networks and messaging systems that help us easily find those people, and subsequently the knowledge they have.

Imagine discovering a company you are not familiar with in a news article, and wanting to know who their competitors are. If you use the standard means of Search, you would spend some time on Google, or your intranet, or a research tool like Factiva to get your answer. Think instead if you could click on the company, and have a list of people in your enterprise or industry peers that have a relationship to that company (a procurement person, a sales person, a technology person, etc.). An instant (or micro) message directed at one or more of the people listed, gives you access to all of there knowledge. They will likely either know the answer directly, or be able to tell you where to find the answer.

Intelligence obtained from your social network, not your ability to search. Connecting with people that are informed, not finding relevant information. A powerful way to benefit from the volumes of information we are presented with, and not be overwhelmed by it.

Of course enabling social intelligence is only one of the things that needs to happen. New information management technologies are still critical. I just think we should do our best to get the most out of our existing technologies, while future technologies are being development.

Ken Sickles Business Intelligence, Information Management, Social Media Business Intelligence, Information Management, social intelligence, Social Media