Know Your Competition
If you own a company, you should know everything about the companies that you consider competition. I’m always surprised when I talk to our competition and they have no clue what we are up to (especially as we are such an open book at our company). There is no excuse for not monitoring your competition, especially with all the tools available on the web.
Here are 6 things you should be doing to keep on top of what your competition is doing.
1) Subscribe To Their Blogs: This is pretty obvious, but whenever your competition posts to their blog, you should be the first one to read it. Usually company blogs contain information regarding new features, partnership launches, hires and give you insight into their culture. In addition, read the comments and see what their users’ reactions are to what is being posted.
2) Use Their Products: You should have an account set up on each of your competitors’ websites and every couple weeks poke around. A lot of your competitors will soft launch their new features weeks before they will ever release them to the press. If you are using their website, you will know about their feature launches way before they are announced. On a side note, make sure you subscribe in your account settings on their sites to their email newsletter and communications.
3) Look At Their Pictures: Most companies have pictures posted on MySpace, Facebook or Flikr. You wouldn’t believe how much you can learn from really looking at these pictures. From my experience, I’ve figured out how many employees our competitors have, what they are planning for the future, the computers they are running, even what their culture is like within their office. One of our competitors even posted a picture of a whiteboard within their office, which had a list of to do items. You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff we learned from that one picture.
4) Monitor The Web: The web is huge and to get your hands around the information being released about your competitors, you need to set up Google Alerts. This tool sends you an email whenever your competitor’s names pop up anywhere on the web.
5) Monitor Twitter: There is so much being said on Twitter about your competitors - you have to be monitoring it. I use tools such as TweetDeck and TweetAlert to alert me if someone mentions my competition.
6) Know The People Behind The Scenes: Figure out everything about the people that you are up against. Learn what makes them tick, why they started the company and what they do after the work day ends. Most of the time you can learn all of this from a simple friend request on Facebook, and as an added bonus that person won’t be able to get anything done for a few days as they nervously ponder why you would friend request a competitor.
Monitoring your competition is great, but unless you analyze and react to the information you are receiving it’s pretty much useless. Figure out why your competition is receiving the press they are, why their customers are reacting the way they are and most importantly what you can do different to get a leg up on your competition.
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January 29, 2009 at 6:46 pm
[...] you can always read Derek johnson’s post Know Your Competition and get that jump that just might help you ...
December 8, 2009 at 2:15 pm
[...] Know Your Competition [...]