I have written about Tineye before.
For Competitive Intelligence research, I use TinEye to search for images used by the target company to find where they are buying advertising space and to find affiliated sites.
Tag Archive for 'Competitive Intelligence'
TweetMeme is a service which aggregates links on Twitter to determine which links are most popular. TweetMeme categorises these links into Categories, Subcategories and Channels, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what you’re interested in.
We make it easy for you to subscribe to each category and the most popular through their RSS feeds and Twitter accounts.
The thing that interests me most is the search facility that works quite well, especially for finding Tweets that include company names.
If you have ever wondered why private industry doesn’t improve its use of the intelligence function, then I suggest you read Part 4 — Even Better News!! (How To Get A Job In Intelligence) over at Sources and Methods, a blog by Kristan J. Wheaton, an assistant professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College. Mr. Wheaton’s experience mirrors mine, but he has managed to express it better than I could.
Intelligence Positions in Industry
Even if you can get past the spook factor, though, there is still a perception by many businesses that they do not need intelligence. My technique in these cases is to ask the managers and executives I deal with, “Who in your company has it as a fundamental part of their job — as part of their job description — to systematically examine all the factors relevant to your company’s success but outside your company’s control, integrate those factors as necessary and provide estimates of how those factors will change over time in order to support your planning processes?”
The answers vary, of course. Some companies have market analysts but they are not tasked to look at the competition. Others have competitive intelligence and market analysts but clearly have other intelligence needs that aren’t being met (like the company with a global presence that needs to understand if its employees are likely to get kidnapped or the company who transports critical raw materials in ships that travel off the coast of Somalia…).
Even if all the various needs are covered, no one is integrating the reports, coordinating the activities or providing meaningful estimates about how conditions are likely to change. Some places have even told me that performing this function is “everyone’s job” but I just laugh (I can do that because I am a professor and not a consultant).
No matter what the answer, the discussion leads to the follow-on question: “Don’t you think it would be useful to have someone who does all this for you?” The answer is always, “Yes” but it still translates only slowly, if at all, into intelligence jobs.
There are two types of research.
Strategic Research
This is to determine the best course of action. For example, in which direction to drive.
Tactical Research
This is how to achieve the best course of action. This is deciding which road to take. This is also about the essential details to reaching your strategic goal.
This might seem obvious, but I’m forever being reminded that it isn’t.
These searches will help you to find people associated with a company or find a subject’s co-workers.
Start with Twitter’s Find People. Search for the company name. A long list of followers of the company Tweets might be very enlightening.
Search the Twitter Profiles using Twellow by searching for the firm name, web site URL or other relevant search terms.Sometimes former employees appear in the results and may prove to be useful interview subjects.
LinkedIn is one of the most used social networking sites. Use Google to search LinkedIn for Twitter references with a search term such as site:linkedin.com company name. twitter to the search string to find twitter feeds. Do the same search using Bing and Yahoo.Then redo all the searches for FaceBook and MySpace and any other social network site that might be useful.
Use TweepSearch to search the Twitter name of someone and then index the bios of all the users they are following or are following them. Once you have them indexed, you can do a keyword search using relevant search terms. The results may lead you to the bios of additional members of the firm for which the subject works.
The antics of Glen Jenvey clearly illustrates that really interesting data are also very often untrue.
Jenvey created some bogus posts to a web forum that were very interesting. He then “leaked” the existence of these bogus posts to the South West News agency which was used by a major newspaper which in turn published an article about the phony data.
This type of thing is commonplace in my work. Here’s how it works. A person or company wants to get something misleading into the news so that a competitor or client sees it, and more importantly, acts on it.
They get somebody to get it into a little-known backwater paper that sends its interesting stories to a large news wire service. The wire story is then picked-up by a much larger news outlet and the story spreads.
This type of mischief can only be eliminated by ruthless fact-checking.
Fifth generation warfare hasn’t yet occurred, but our economy is being reshaped by it nonetheless. The insurance and re-insurance loses from 9/11 were between 30 and 60 billion US Dollars. The so-called war on terrorism is an attempt to prevent the formation of operational networks of 5GW actors. It strives to limit the conditions and circumstances that would foster an outbreak of 5GW attacks. I am not confident that the “war on terrorism” will succeed any more than the “war on drugs”. On the other hand, what choice do we have. The loses from a 1 megaton nuclear bomb in New York City that kills 1.9 million defies calculation.
9/11 was carried out by a network of religious zealots from one known terrorist organisation, yet they were not noticed until it was too late. Now stop and think about how hard it would be to detect and thwart a network of people from several disparate groups.
Insurgencies (4GW) and 5GW warfare are often described as “low-intensity warfare”. This is a misnomer in the economic sense — just look at the cost of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. One must accept at the outset that there will not be a clear winner in such a conflict, and that the participants involved will not value victory in the same way and that the fighting may end before total victory by one side. Unfortunately, many people have a hard time understanding this and in trying to win, spend far too much on the military effort. This lack of understanding of the so-called low-intensity conflict by both politicians and the public creates some opportunities while at the same time creates great economic risk.
My research identified 5 good news/bad news issues surrounding 5GW that are starting to shape policy.
- Who will do the fighting and how will this effect the economy? The US consumer represents about 20% of the world economy and between 60% and 70% of the US economy. Consumers in their peak buying period usually do the war-fighting.
- The Department of Homeland Security, and similar ministries in other countries, may become”ministries of everything” where every decision is considered for security ramifications. This bottleneck will strangle the economy, except for companies that have an “inside track”.
- Adding security costs to the deficit will further devalue the US currency. This is a retrograde tax on American citizens; even worse, to maintain trade with the US, other countries will have to follow suit. This will really damage the economies of many allied countries. Retired people living on retirement benefits will suffer. This will force governments to raise taxes to pay supplementary benefits. This has the potential to become a destructive self-reinforcing trend.
- Power breeds a thirst for more power. The security apparatus of some countries may become overbearing and dangerous to civil liberties and democracy itself.
- Two lower cost solutions exist — developing a culture of preparedness and service at home, and extensive use of public diplomacy abroad. The development of a true militia to supply emergency manpower and a more active foreign policy based upon public diplomacy, particularly by the allied countries such as Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU will lower the costs created by fear and uncertainty.
Each of these five issues present strategic opportunities, and risks, for service companies and manufacturers alike.
Previous articles on this topic:
While 4GW is primarily counterinsurgency warfare describe as “armed social work”, 5GW is an entirely different beast in many respects.
The nature of the 5GW is supposed to be a group of fighters who form a network. Their only common character is that they want to destroy the same thing, but their different reasons for doing so don’t affect the operation at hand. They use modern communication technologies to plan and direct their actions, then they disperse. The 5G beast doesn’t field armies or espouse a central ideal or idea. Worse still, by not losing, the enemy wins. The 5G war is about winning through political stalemate, instability, and economic stagnation or decline. This is warfare against economic success. With nothing to shoot at, how do you win? Without a rational idea to prove wrong, how do win hearts and minds?
5GW is the disaffected turning their hatred towards what they want, but don’t have. These fighters will use the lessons of 4GW and modern technology. The battlefield may become universal. Everything from a Toronto water treatment plant, my bank’s computer system, and the Strait of Hormuz become the battlefield, and all at the same time. 5GW may originate with the current crop of Muslim terrorists and to some extent, narco-terrorists, but I doubt it will remain their province. This type of warfare just offers too many opportunities for a host of perverse sub-cultures — if they can make it work.
Responding with 3G type warfare won’t solve this problem. Genocide won’t eliminate this problem. 4GW techniques won’t make much of a dent in this problem. Current thinking indicates that until we find a global solution to this, risks of an outbreak of 5GW we will have to factor those risks into our planning and look for opportunities to become part of the solution, or to profit from the lack of a solution.
I see 5GW as the worst-case situation from an economic standpoint, even if we change our attitudes towards military service, security operations, and international security. Fear of 5GW is already reshaping our world and perhaps this fear will produce the dominant cost factor we face from this threat.
I’m not sure this type of warfare is really on the horizon, but certain elements of it have made an appearance. If 5GW comes to be, then the costs of trying to protect everything at once would be astronomical. In the an upcoming article I will explain the 5GW issues that are starting to shape policy today and their potential effect on the economies of the industrialised world.
Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a window looking out onto the landscape that affects strategy and future prospects. Therefore, economic issues play a large part in how we view the competitive landscape. However, I never thought CI work would take me in the direction that it has recently.
Two or three years ago the economic issues were the effects of the asset inflation credit bubble and the effects of the resultant growth of the money supply. Now the strategic issue is the causes and effects of huge government deficits.
In this new strategic concern, there exist two subjects of importance for understanding the competitive environment. The first is the effect of stimulus spending and the second is the ongoing cost of warfare. Military spending has brought down governments and impoverished nations throughout history. Today, companies that produce products and supply services need to understand the markets that modern military spending have created and they must understand the effects such spending has on both the national and the world economy. To understand this topic, one must begin by understanding the evolution of modern warfare from the Napoleonic wars and onward.
Beginning with Napoleon, we have seen four generations of war fighting. The first generation of warfare (1GW) was the beginning of modern technological warfare involving conscription, industrial scale production of weapons, and financial systems designed to fund warfare. This also heralded the end of the Mercenary due to the formation of large standing national armies.
Next came the economic organisation of the nation state to put the full resource potential of the nation at the disposal of the war effort for financial gain. These were the wars of empire.
The third generation of warfare (3GW) was industrialized war fought for land and resources using established abilities from 1GW and 2GW. This evolved into the war of maneuver that we saw in WWII.
Fourth generation warfare is a moral conflict often using ad hoc fighters with an ideal for command and control, not a unified command structure. This was Vietnam and it is Iraq today. Winning this is a matter of getting people to reject an existing ideal for something more productive, while maintaining military superiority that can overcome the actions of small flexible groups of enemy combatants. This type of counterinsurgency, to borrow David Kilcullen’s shorthand, is described as “armed social work.”
The industrialized world knows how to fight 3G type of war. The experiences of Vietnam and Iraq taught us what it takes to fight the fourth generation war (4GW). While the 4GW is expensive, a cost can be assigned to the war with some accuracy based upon experience. This reduces uncertainty which is the most hated thing in both business and military planning. It also creates business opportunities. For example, the mercenary has become important to the success of this type of warfare after a 200 years of absence from the battlefield. Secure computer networks for command and control are essential in this environment. New types of vehicles are required to move personnel around. All the housing and equipment must be serviced. All these areas, and more, offer agile companies an opportunity to make profit.
On the other hand, we shouldn’t downplay the economic damage a 4G war can do to the combatant nations. For example, the cost of the Vietnam war forced Nixon to abolish the gold standard to stop the redemption of US Dollar holdings by foreign governments which would have wiped out the US gold reserve. A devalued dollar, stagflation, and recessions followed — and so did the lack of monetary discipline that created the most recent economic crises.
The potential emergence of 5GW consumes much of my current research time. The costs of this are truly frightening. The next article will explain why this is so.
The following is an excellent article about Competitive Intelligence that appeared in yetserday’s Globe and Mail.
Even the smallest of operations can scout out the competition, and the results can be vital
This is competitive intelligence, and Jonathan Calof, a professor at University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management and a leading CI expert, says it’s widely misunderstood.
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that competitive intelligence is too complex and expensive for small businesses to undertake. In fact, most CI techniques cost nothing but time, and the findings are vital to small business success, especially in tough times.
Jon Lowder at CI Marketplace writes that Lenny Fuld highlights the value of the contrarians in our midst when he explains why he’d like to meet a character in the Madoff mess:
No matter how certain, how comfortable you may be with an answer, a popular answer, an answer that comforts or confirms, you need to pay attention to … the minority and taking them seriously.
If you don’t like the content of a minority opinion, then find out if it is right through independent and impartial research!
Litigation may tell you what the target company doesn’t want you to know.
Here are five things to look for when reviewing a company’s legal entanglements:
- Is the company the target of large scale mass tort actions?
- Is the company facing class action claims for faulty products and/or services?
- Is the company facing lawsuits claiming shoddy or unfair business practices?
- Have employees sued for wrongful dismissal?
- Are shareholders claiming the company knew about material facts that depressed their stock price and failed to disclose them?
In today’s National Post a vague article entitled, Spying doesn’t pay, prattles on about ethics and warns about the weak moral fibre and criminality of competitive intelligence practitioners.
I find it hard to get over pendants who don’t meet a payroll, deal with shareholders, or shifting market forces, who always tell you what you are doing wrong. This inane stuff continues to annoy me — I know it shouldn’t, but for three decades I’ve been hearing the same twaddle. As an example from today’s article:
Perhaps the most surprising finding is that among the troubling incidence of misrepresentation, manipulation, covert surveillance and theft, one of the most common ethical problems in competitive intelligence is the unsolicited discovery of a competitor’s trade secrets.
Theft is a crime, while misrepresentation, manipulation, and covert surveillance may, or may not comprise some part of a crime. Of course no details provided. He just wants us to believe this is SOP in business today. The unsolicited discovery of a competitor’s trade secrets is what Competitive Intelligence is about and he wants to equate that with criminal behaviour.
And he continues in this vein:
Managers in our study repeatedly recounted incidents where sensitive competitor information had been disclosed by customers, suppliers, or disgruntled former employees of their competitors. Sometimes these were not sent purposefully, but were accidentally conveyed by e-mail, or as one corporate lawyer put it, “the mysterious fax problem.” Sometimes, simple eavesdropping of one’s competitors at a trade show or on the plane can reap precious inside information. Quite simply, information insecurity is widespread, and there is no lack of competitors that might be tempted to take advantage.
If somebody sends me useful competitive intel, then I must read it to determine what is to be done about it. If it is obviously stolen, then I must determine my legal position in relationship to possession of this data. If the data was clearly stolen I will not become a receiver of stolen property. The use of the word “eavesdropping” has the connotation that this is criminal or improper. Quite to the contrary, overhearing someone talking about something important to you is not a crime or improper. If receiving the data is not a crime or tort, then it is mine — finders keepers.
And yet it continues:
Use of competitor information known to be confidential can breach trade secret law and goes against the golden rule of “do unto others as they would do unto you.”
If the competitor releases the information in a public venue, then I would like this author to tell us what law has been breached by the party who receives information. If the competitor release the data in public it is no longer confidential. It doesn’t matter how or why he released the data.
And now we get to the objective of this claptrap:
Perhaps even more of a concern for companies is the revelation that a lack of attention to the ethics of competitive intelligence gathering can result in employees assuming they have tacit approval for an anything goes approach to competitors. This can instil a culture of moral laxity that incrementally takes hold in other practices, roles and functions within the organization. Bottom line: lack of attention to industrial espionage can have repercussions for the entire ethical culture of the organization.
Let me translate: you won’t know the difference between criminal industrial espionage and competitive intelligence unless you read my book (Ethical Challenges in Competitive Intelligence) and hire me at outrageous rates to waste your time on this twaddle, after all, you business people aren’t very smart or moral.
My work as a Competitive Intelligence (CI) Researcher or Investigator has evolved from fulfilling information requirements of established projects, to managing projects within projects. I expect this trend to continue over the next decade as the complexity of information and analysis requirements increase.
As the concepts of Project Management are imposed on Investigations, CI, forecasting and planning processes, study of this area of business skill will not only become absolutely necessary for all managers, but also for people like me.
offers an excellent look at the prime components of success and failure as a project manager through a short and very readable review of Napoleon’s greatest achievements and the origins of his ruination. This is the best primer on the subject that I have read.
Loose Lips Sink Competitors
Competisaurus has just let the world know my secret techniques for predicting maritime disasters. Twitter Search is like sitting in a dockside bar listening to enemy sailors plot some dastardly attack. If you understand that competitive intelligence isn’t a guessing game like Battleship, then searching Twitter might help your marketing salvo sink a competitor’s Battleship. Now keep this to yourself, let it be our little secret.
The Twitter Threat
On the other hand, landlubbers at US Army intelligence wrote a report on the Twitter-threat. The report postulates that Twitter could be used for coordinating terrorist attacks. The report supposedly states, “Twitter was recently used as a counter-surveillance, command and control, and movement tool by activists at the Republican National Convention,”. “The activists would Tweet each other and their Twitter pages to add information on what was happening with Law Enforcement near real time.”
Must we tweet this Twitter-threat stuff seriously?