Tap the Social Media Stream for Competitors' Secrets

"The person was complaining because a cloud services provider had contacted them and asked them to invest in a cloud solution," recalls Lisa Dreher, vice president of marketing at Logicalis, in Farmington Hills, Mich. Nevertheless, when the person discovered that the vendor to tell the truth wasn't able to offer the right solution, he turned to LinkedIn to voice his "frustration," which, according to Dreher, "was a good thing because we really had the cloud solution they needed. So our sales rep was able to say, 'We can help you with that.'" In the long run, Logicalis sold the individual its own cloud service.

For several years now, companies have been using tools just as HootSuite and Radian 6 to monitor what people say about them in social media. The new twist is that more and more companies are tapping the social media stream to learn highly valuable information about rival businesses, says Richard Plansky, senior managing director at Kroll, a New York-based risk consulting company that offers corporate intelligence programs.

Take, for instance, a startup CEO who posted a question on Quora, a collaborative question-and-answer site, regarding a rival's revenue model. The CEO, who asked to remain anonymous, wanted to know how one of his key competitors makes money, afterwards failing to find that information online. Within days, "the head of business development at the company in fact answered my question -- not knowing that I was a competitor," marvels the startup's CEO.

For this reason, Plansky recommends turning to a third-party service with professionals who are highly trained at gathering data, using monitoring innovation and drawing actionable insights from all sorts of information and sources.

Do-it-yourself approach to competitive intelligence

For businesses that prefer a do-it-yourself approach to competitive intelligence, there are more than 200 social media monitoring tools promising to flag online conversations about you and your competitors. Radian 6, to illustrate, tracks mentions on more than 100 million social media sites, letting users react in real-time to everything from competitors' product launches to customer criticism. Another popular monitoring solution is Lithium, which helps companies find online mentions and posts with strong emotions. Users can benchmark these results against those of its competitors. The prices of these tools range from free to hundreds of dollars per month for a subscription.

Whether a company opts for a veteran consulting company just as Kroll or a free monitoring solution just as Google Alerts, the hardest part about mining social networks is avoiding information overload.

Comprehensive competitive intelligence program

Rather than roll out a comprehensive competitive intelligence program, Dreher says Logicalis simply calls on Webbed Marketing to collect information at critical times. For instance, when Logicalis recently expanded into the cloud computing market, the company began tracking customer responses to its competitors' cloud offerings and product features through social media channels.