Let’s Talk Knowledge

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