Analyzing Blogs for Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence is one of the most important functions of a marketing organization yet many CI professionals are missing the connection between CI and online discussions. I was at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) annual conference in Chicago this week where Cymfony was a sponsor.

I had the opportunity to speak with many people from large organizations in the healthcare, technology, telecom, consumer products and financial services industries. The level of commitment people had to the CI profession was refreshing to see. When I asked people what the greatest value was that they bring to their organizations I received a variety of responses.

But the most common response was that CI brings key insights to marketing, customer service and sales to help these organizations increase performance. For marketing, that means designing products that meet customer needs. For CS, that means identifying and responding to problems quickly. For sales, that means arming the sales person with information that will help them explain their competitive advantages.

Most CI teams spend a considerable amount of time and money on primary research peforming interviews with customers and analyzing lost opportunities (people who said see you later). Most were well aware of user forums and discussion groups but only a handful had spent considerable time researching blogs as a rich source for competitive intelligence and market research. The driving factor for the new interest in blogs is that CMO's and CEO's are asking questions about the impact of blogs on consumer opinion and corporate reputation.

While primary research will always be an important tool (this is what I was doing at the conference) for gathering intelligence, the number of conversations any researcher can have is limited by time and expense. Supplementing primary research with tools that enable researchers to gather comments quickly from hundreds or thousands of customers (yours or your competitors), makes tremendous sense. Cymfony offers it's own solution for gathering and analyzing this information but every researcher who isn't already doing so should start tapping into the rich commentary from users today by searching and reading blogs focused on your industry or products. I'll guarantee you that some of your competitors are already doing this.