Traditional Competitive Intelligence is in a rut. Books, websites, whitepapers and presentations all echo the same techniques and priorities that defined the practice 10 years ago. Research public filings, read credentialed analyst reports, talk to employees and former employees if you can, be careful of blogs they might not be trustworthy. Social media? Be extra careful of that too.
Traditional CI process and practice has largely missed out on more than a decade of change in the way businesses and employees communicate. The reality is that we are producing more information more quickly than at any other time in history. According to Google we produce as much information every two days as we did in all of history up to 2003! Some of this information is machine data and metadata. Much of it is user generated content. These are things like Tweets, Instagram photo uploads, Facebook or LinkedIn status updates as well as blogs, web pages and shared presentations.
The problem is not that the traditional CI focus on interviewing employees and reading web pages was wrong. Rather, the venue has changed. Instead of needing to track down employees to get juicy details, the CI professional simply needs to listen to the public conversations that are already going on through social media channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor and numerous other socially enabled sites. This is called Social Competitive Intelligence.
Of course there is an art to the practice as well. Where in years past the traditional CI pro needed skills in finding and persuading employees to talk, the new Social CI pro requires superpowers to filter and categorize the flood of information we’re all producing. The new CI pro requires less sleuthing ability and more synthesis power; the ability to bring different facts together to form a complete picture.
Part of this synthesis means combining social competitive intelligence with traditional CI as well as traditional business intelligence. Both traditional CI and traditional BI do an amazing job of helping organizations understand what is happening. But it is Social Competitive Intelligence that provides the market, competitive and social media context in which business operates. When you correlate BI, traditional CI and Social CI insights, you understand the “why” of performance along with the “what” of your BI analytics.
Understanding the “why” is vital if you’re going to ever achieve the end of any CI or BI practice: figuring out what to do next. Data is not insight. Getting more data has never been the goal. Deriving insight from data is what makes intelligence actionable. The goal of any all CI practice is Actionable Intelligence.
Actionable Intelligence spots trends before they take you by surprise. Actionable Intelligence spots gaps in the market that mean opportunity for new products and offerings. Actionable Intelligence gets you out front of competition and moves your business from a reactionary to a proactive starting point.
BloomThink 