Register here – http://www.svpma.org/workshops.html

High level outline below….

Workshop Summary

Understanding your competitors’ next moves or knowing how well they are putting their current plans into effect can mean the difference between success and failure in your market. During this seminar you’ll learn how to leverage social media, search the deep Web, and use human intelligence to gather actionable insight into your competitors’ future direction. However, there are ethical pitfalls in conducting competitive intelligence studies – we’ll reveal what they are and discuss how you can avoid them.

This ½ day workshop will cover all you need to know on how to gather competitive intelligence via Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) resources, elicit information from human intelligence sources, how to apply the information you’ve learned to product planning, product marketing, and sales efforts, and lastly how to pull it all together and communicate it effectively throughout the organization.

Session topics:

Mining Social Media
How to mine social networking sites for valuable competitive intelligence information. You’ll learn how to determine critical facts and information about your competitors – where they are investing, features of their upcoming products and tips on identifying their customers.

Mining The Deep Web
How you can use free web tools and sites such as SlideShare, Silobreaker, Glassdoor, and other targeted search engines, portals, and sites to get a much better view of your competitors’ positioning, and their current activity in your market. You’ll learn about their culture and ethics; their strategies, as disclosed by their own leadership; how to quickly get a deep understanding of their offerings; and even see how they stack up against your company.

Human Intelligence and Qualitative Research
How to identify and recruit individuals who can provide insight into your competitors’ moves and the industry trends you’re facing. We’ll show you how to conduct effective interviews once you’ve identified the right potential targets in partner, reseller, and influencer channels. We’ll also discuss techniques to make recruiting these individuals more effective via social networking and in person events. Lastly, we’ll highlight ethical and legal concerns that you need to take into account when conducting these types of activities.

Pulling It All Together
Pull together human and OSINT sources to show you how can effectively package competitive intelligence for internal consumption, package it for partner, field, or customer audiences, and how to recognize when competitive intelligence efforts should be paused or change direction.

More details and reviews available here – Go Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence.

Yippy is a search engine that queries other search engines and then groups the results together in clusters.

Information Provided:

• Automatic categorization of search results
• Parsing of results into logical groupings by content, search engine source, or top-level domain
• Ability to streamline search results, making them simpler to examine

Description:

Yippy gives users multiple ways of ranking search results that it obtains from multiple search engines all over the Web. It combines search results into clusters and then provides several ways of manipulating those groupings, according to the needs of the individual task at hand.

The technology behind Yippy was developed by and recently purchased from the company Vivismo, where it was called “Clusty.” The new owner, Yippy Inc., continues to refine the engine to provide simpler, more robust search that can help competitive intelligence professionals rapidly focus in on the subset of search results that are most useful to their purposes.

Market research in the early stages of the product’s development revealed that most users examine only the first three or so pages of the results they obtain from a search engine. While that tendency is logical given the time constraints most of us operate under, it’s also a problem when results can easily stretch to many dozens or hundreds of pages.

Yippy provides a novel approach that helps overcome that issue. In the words of Emily Parker, VP of operations for Yippy Incorporated, “People aren’t going to go to page 20 or page 40 of Google results, because it’s too time-consuming. Because we index and cluster the results by category, you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for on the first page.”

One approach to overcoming this issue has been to create very complex search strings, and indeed, Google in particular is designed to support syntax in search strings that resembles programming code. While that approach is well suited to programmers and database administrators who are well accustomed to complex, machine-oriented queries, it is simply not accessible to many competitive intelligence professionals and mainstream business users.

Yippy specializes in using very simple search requests, which it submits to multiple search engines. While it returns an enormous number of results, it also goes a step further by providing the means to easily categorize and navigate through them. Whereas most search engines return a flat listing of pages, Yippy gives a hierarchical set of results designed to help users easily refine what they are looking for.

This approach takes some of the burden off of the user, in terms of anticipating how the search engine might interpret their needs. As a result, the search process becomes a sort of conversational give and take between Yippy and the user. The left pane of the results page provides three tabs that provide simple means to re-categorize results at a glance.

There is also a series of content categories accessible from just above the search box, including web, jobs, government, and so on that let you easily specify the type of information you want. As Parker said, “I recommend that people should make good use of those categories. We have really taken a lot of the complexity out of search with those tools, and they are very effective at returning the specific types of results you want.”

The “clouds” tab provides a set of content-oriented categories, as well as a “remix” button that automatically generates a completely new categorization scheme, helping users re-conceive the results with a single click. The “sources” tab allows easy navigation according to which search engine returned the results, and the “sites” tab groups the results by top-level domain (“.com,” “.org,” etc.), which gives easy filtering by the type and geographical location of the organization whose Web page hosts the results.

Yippy maintains a large number of custom databases that help it intelligently generate its results, and it also leverages certain external resources, such as the ability to pull results specifically from the Library of Congress or the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Similarly, it blocks certain types of extraneous content, such as pornography, which helps to reduce the noise in the results. On the whole, Yippy does a good job of streamlining the search process without sacrificing robustness and flexibility.

Competitive Intelligence Usefulness:

Using Yippy, competitive intelligence professionals can move what they are looking for from being deeply embedded within a sea of search results to the top layer, using a variety of different means to do so. Since that corresponds to one of the key goals of Cascade Insights (and competitive intelligence in general, for that matter), Yippy is definitely worth a look.

Our Book

Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence

SlideShare is a place where people can upload slide presentations on any topic.

Information Provided:

· Presentations that let you get up to speed quickly on trends or topics

· Quick identification of Subject Matter Experts

· Competitor positioning, , strengths, comparisons, partners, roadmaps, tactical and strategic plays, etc.

Description:

SlideShare does for PowerPoint what YouTube does for video. Slideshare was founded in 2006 and it receives nearly 2m visits a month. Users can upload presentations, Word documents, and PDF files on any topics they want, and SlideShare has grown to the point where there is information available on just about anything.

Slideshare lets users browse through the most popular, most downloaded, and most recent presentations. Slideshare also lets users upload videos and presentations with audio (which the site terms “slidecasts”).

While Slideshare is an interesting place to hang out, the search functionality is what makes it most useful to the competitive intelligence professional. If you’re trying to come up to speed on a topic, you can use the search functionality to quickly find recent presentations on the subject.

It also helps if the presentation is recent, so it’s it’s useful to use the Slideshare search options to restrict the results to the last month or year.

Beyond leveraging Slideshare to quickly research a topic you can use it to find experts on a subject. Better yet you can validate an individual’s expertise by simply reviewing the presentation they have posted, compare it to others, and information you’ve already gleamed on the subject you’re researching. Essentially it’s a “knowledge resume” in the form of a slide deck. Once you’ve picked a few deck authors that you want to reach out to it is usually trivial to find contact information as the authors usually put their email address right in the presentation.

Beyond topic background, Slideshare is useful to dig into a competitor, see how they’re positioning their products and services, and even see how they compare themselves to the competition. Competitor presentations can often be found on Slideshare, and these can provide deep insight into where the competitor feels they’re strong, and where they want to steer the conversation.

We’ve also found Slideshare to be useful to “virtually attend” a conference. It isn’t always the case, but we’ve found some or all of the presentations of certain conferences posted to Slideshare. We’ve even surprisingly found presentations for partner conferences and other events that are not generally open to the public. This kind of content can show in-depth competitive positioning, information about the partner and reseller channel (including channel incentives), and product roadmaps.

Usefulness:

Slideshare is a site we check out for most of the competitive projects we work on. It’s certain to provide good background information on a technology, product, or industry. It also frequently identifies experts that we follow up with to perform qualitative research. And sometimes we strike gold, and get a product roadmap, pricing, or other information that isn’t readily available through other public means.

A place where employees can anonymously post various details about their company

Information Provided:

• Salaries for different roles within a company
• Pros and cons of working there
• “Advice to management” from the employee’s perspective
• Details about hiring interviews

Description:

Glassdoor (http://www.glassdoor.com) is a Web site that lets employees post a wealth of information about their employer.  By sharing their individual salaries, interview experiences, and reviews of their company, employees get to see what other people have posted – about their company and any other one.

Tim Besse, cofounder of Glassdoor, explains the genesis of the site, saying, “We started wondering what our company would be like if the internal company survey, and internal company salaries, were just posted to the Internet.  Not that we could do that, but what effect would something like that have on companies?”

For employees and job seekers, this is obviously a huge boon.  Are you being offered a low salary compared to other people with that title at the company?  How’s morale?  What can you expect for raises?  How can you best prepare for an interview?  For an idea of the data and how it’s presented, the following is a screen shot of the salaries for a technical company known as VMware:

Employees can also review their company and describe what they see as the pros and cons of working there, as well as provide “advice to management.”  Any individual employee review should be taken with a grain of salt, but a relatively large number of reviews do paint a reasonably good picture of the company culture.

In fact, Glassdoor goes to great lengths to ensure the quality of the data.  As Besse explains, “Every review has to list pros and cons, and every review is read before it goes live.  There’s not a single review that’s all negative.  Users have to join the site to post a review, and have to use a valid email address.  And we have processes in place to keep a user from posting multiple reviews to drive down the rating of companies.  Ultimately, we disqualify 15 percent of reviews for not meeting our standards.  Sixty percent of the companies on Glassdoor are rated ‘OK’ or better.”

And with the wide range of review sites out there, users have become conditioned to read multiple reviews and look for trends, rather than just rely on a single review.  Going back to VMware, the following is an example of one such review:

From a competitive intelligence standpoint, we often look at Glassdoor for information about morale, layoffs, expansion, and floundering or excelling product teams.  In short, it gives you an “inside the company” flavor that would take significantly longer to determine through interviews and other Web searches.  It’s also a place where you often discover unexpected tidbits of information that can lead to further investigation.

Besse provides further advice for competitive intelligence professionals, saying, “You can subscribe to an RSS feed for companies so you know immediately when a review is posted.  You can also filter by location, job title, or keywords.  For example, you might sense that the inside salespeople are saying something very different from the outside salespeople, and you can use filters to look specifically at the challenges that outside sales is facing.  One other thing we’ve noticed is that when one company starts to run away with the market, their company name starts showing up often in competitor reviews.  When Apple introduced the iPhone, “Apple” began to show up in many reviews for RIM.

Competitive Intelligence Usefulness:

It’s always worth looking at Glassdoor.  It often provides information that you just won’t find anywhere else, and exposes lots of threads that warrant further investigation.  And this kind of internal information on the competition is always interesting.  The biggest challenge is figuring out how to translate the findings about culture, compensation, and morale at the competition into strategies and tactics for your own company.

Our Book
Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence

NationMaster.com – good statistics on countries, people, etc. – http://bit.ly/iydy

NNDB Mapper – Visually connect the relationships between individuals – http://bit.ly/bKnD9

Journalist’s List of Databases – http://bit.ly/dmIaGs

Happn.in – http://bit.ly/12SUDL – a way to find local tweets for your city

Use LinkedIn’s new "Follow Company" feature to get notified when emp leave, company profiles get updated, etc

Yahoo Firehose – http://ow.ly/1xz5r – interesting data you can query – let’s me pull out my old school DB Skills

Example Yahoo Firehose Query – "select title,abstract from search.news where query="ipad"

LinkedIn’s advanced search operators – http://bit.ly/HPhYd – "ptitle:" "company"" "interest" and others

Track your competitor’s links that go through Twitter with Twitt(url)y – http://bit.ly/bc8Xyk

TechAgreements.com – http://www.techagreements.com/default.aspx

For example a review of 2008 filing for the American Marketing Association shows information such as the amount of money the organization made from membership dues (3.1m), the salary of the executive director (345k a year), the top contractors the organization utilized for professional services (Manifest Digital – 1.4m), and all services (Brown Printing – $518,000). 

In short if you are interested in comparing executive director salary ranges at non profits, benchmarking non profits in terms of how much revenue they receive from memberships vs. events, or you just want to understand who is doing the most work on an outsourced basis for a non-profit, the Form 990 is one of your better bets.

Lastly, while there are various ways to access Form 990 data one straightforward way is via the site www.guidestar.org. 

Median Age of Company Employees from 40 to 50 years old

"median age, * 40..45 years" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Companies with a % of male employees from 20 to 30%

"Male, * 20..30 %" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Companies that were founded between 1999 and 2001

"Founded, * 1999..2001" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Companies where employees typically move onto VMware after leaving the company

"* after: * VMware" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

And obviously many of the elements of the queries above can be modified such that a query such as:

• "Founded, * 1999..2001" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Can easily become:

• "Founded, * 2000..2003" site:linkedin.com/companies/*

Follow us on Twitter – @sean_campbell and @scottswigart

• New Hires
• Recent Promotions
• Company Headquarters and Field Office Locations
• What company are new employees coming from, and what company do employees go to when they leave
• Related companies
• Company Size
• How are employees in one company connected to employees in another

And a variety of other pieces of interesting information all found on the – “Company” pages on LinkedIn.

Ex: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/citrix-systems?trk=co_search_results&goback=.cps_1267829556599_1

http://www.slideshare.net/campsean/
when-worlds-collide-market-research-meets-ci-final