Competitive Intelligence and Search Marketing: Keep it Smart, Keep it Legal!
by Adam Schultz and JP Sherman

The next session I attended was Forensic and Competitive Intelligence with Jake Baillie (true local), Anne Kennedy (Beyond Ink) and Joe Morin (Boost Search Marketing).

I invited JP Sherman, MarketSmart Interactive's Competitive Intelligence Specialist, to weigh in on my write up - his comments are in itallics (also be sure to read JP's white paper: Using Competitive Search Intelligence to Drive Online Success).

I am really excited about this particular topic because we are having a lot of success at MSI in using competitive intelligence to bring additional intel and value to our clients' campaigns and am looking forward to the continued success this particular area of online marketing is bound to see over the next year.

Jake Baillie
First up was Jake Baillie. If I had to sum up his presentation in one word, I'd choose "ballsy". Why? Because he he came at us with the kind of brutal honesty that - once you get over your initial feeling of shock - you realize how important it is to understand what's he's saying.

He basically covered all the ways that a competitor could try to extract information from or about your company.

Also, maybe, how you could do the same things to get information about your competitors, if you were so inclined, perhaps.

[JP Sherman: This is a challenge to businesses, the virtual environment provides a false sense of anonymity and insularity that doesn’t exist to the same degree in what some have called “meat space” (the opposite of cyber space).

Business owners must be aware of what information they are releasing, understanding that the information released could be used to determine strategies, giving the competition the opportunity to counter that strategy. This doesn’t mean that businesses should stop the flow of information, as that could hamper the relationships they’ve developed with their clients.

What this does mean is that businesses must be savvy and knowledgeable about what they release to the public, what blogs and articles are saying about them, and that online, there is no 9 – 5.

Current and former employees will air grievances and dirty laundry; they will be excited about the new product or strategy that is rolling out that they have made a direct impact on.

Every business should be familiar with the concept of OPSEC (Operational Security), which if implemented as a short organizational training for employees, could prevent the unintentional release of information, protecting you and your business’ good name.]

Here are some of the ways Jake Baille said this info could be acquired:

Phone calls - call people, call wives, employees, ex-employees, you name it. He went over some of the finer points and strategies of the extracting said information but I wont go into that level of detail here as "they" might be watching me.

Purchasing log files from ISPs - Apparently its not that tough to contact a low level tech and give them 100 grand for your competitors logs for the past 2 years. (remember this stuff is coming from Jake, I had nothing to do with it)

His advice is to make sure that you trust your ISP to protect your info from this tactic. Before you balk and say how that would never happen, how do you think HitWise does it?

[JP Sherman: According to the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, that tactic is illegal. Comp. Intrusion - The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act protects the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronically stored data, 18 U.S.C. § 1030”.

Server log information would be considered confidential information. While illegal, there are several documented cases where the theft of confidential digital information has been stolen. The Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) gives the following ethical guidelines:

• To continually strive to increase the recognition and respect of the profession.
• To comply with all applicable laws, domestic and international.
• To accurately disclose all relevant information, including one's identity and organization, prior to all interviews.
• To avoid conflicts of interest in fulfilling one's duties.
• To provide honest and realistic recommendations and conclusions in the execution of one's duties.
• To promote this code of ethics within one's company, with third-party contractors and within the entire profession.
• To faithfully adhere to and abide by one's company policies, objectives, and guidelines.

The goal is not diminish the vigilance of your confidential information, but to inform businesses that there is an ethical guideline to practicing competitive intelligence and there are resources to go to when there is evidence of any illegal intrusions into confidential data.

As a member of SCIP it is my responsibility to perform CI in an ethical and honest method.]

In an effort to lessen the intensity of the presentation, he then discussed some of the more soul safe methods of acquiring comp intel. Use the allinanchor feature with a phrase in quotes to identify link hubs and networks and inspect them visually for good info. Check the top phrases in Adwords and see what they are bidding on and what areas they aren't.

Then we moved into the "It's not paranoia if they really ARE after me" phase of his presentation. He discussed how to know if they are watching and what to do.

Pay attention to site referrals that come from competitor IPs, allinurl queries, whois.sc referrals (now domaintools.com), and cashe requests. Then when you can identify them with a cookie or by their IP you f--- with them.

You send them crazy prices, redirect them to porn sites, serve them loud MDI files, serve infinite popups or you do nothing and just watch them.

Anne Kennedy
Anne Kennedy was next and did her best to bring us back to more direct approaches in both forensic and competitive intel even though by now we were all checking our cell phones for tracking devices.

She discussed the ways to tell what killed or is killing a site and the warning signs that tell you that the end is nigh. Some of the tools are Google cache, indexed pages, xenu reports or SEO-browser.com. It was a lot of the basics but was helpful to then see those things from a competitive perspective and to think of them as forensic tools.

Joe Morin
Joe Morin was up next to further the discussion that Anne started. Joe talked about why Competitive Intelligence is so important to use this intel to better protect trademarks and branded terms, manage affiliates and keep competitors from overstepping their boundaries.

You can glean a lot of information by paying attention: in your keyword space both organically and from a paid perspective and in competitive news alerts and in searching for unique strings of text in your site.

Here is his list of the places to go to acquire good available Competitive Intelligence.

netcraft.com
dnsstuff.com
googspy.com
domaintools.com
alexa.com
archive.com
comscore.com
hitwise.com
marketleap.com
arin.net
pubsub.com
trellian.com

[JP Sherman: There is a distinction between data and intelligence; these are great sites to gain information and data.

However, true intelligence is data analyzed into an actionable plan.

The battlefield commander (I mean, the business owner) must rely on expert analysis of that raw data in order to determine if there are patterns emerging, niches that can be explored, vacuums that can be filled or weaknesses to be exploited (and I mean “exploit” in the nicest possible sense).

Competitive intelligence practitioners take that mountain of data and funnel it into something usable.]

In the QA session I tried to get some info out of them about how they sell the value to clients and if they were looking at these tactics as stand alones.

They bundled and had only thought about this stuff as value added to this point. I took that as good news for JP and I as we really drive our internal competitive intelligence initiatives and help build out this offering.

This session write up by Adam Schultz, MarketSmart Interactive's Manager of Product Development and JP Sherman, who delivers strategic competitive and market research services for MarketSmart Interactive clients using proprietary competitive intelligence technology he helped develop.

Download JP Sherman's white paper, Using Competitive Search Intelligence to Drive Online Success today!
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |