Competitive Intelligence

I attended today's meeting of the Public Relations Society of America (St. Louis chapter) where Fleishman-Hillard's Robert Peirce, a 30-year veteran of public relations and the media, explored crisis communication trends and fears. (He basically answered the "What the heck do you do when the $#!+ hits the fan?" question.)

In his presentation, Peirce mentioned the critical role blogs play in crisis management. "By monitoring the blogs discussing the crisis," he said, "you can calculate the impact that crisis is likely to have."

The same concept actually holds true in competition. By monitoring what bloggers discuss -- your company name, your name, your competitors' company names, etc. -- you can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to competitive intelligence, and more quickly react to opportunities or challenges.

Here's a very easy, and free, way to do exactly that:

1. Subscribe to one of the free blog monitoring services, such as Bloglines.com, and learn how to use it to monitor a single blog. (These monitoring services inform you whenever one of the blogs you monitor has a new post, but you have to know how to add a blog to your monitor list.)
   
2. Visit Google's blog search (http://blogsearch.google.com), and do a search on the words or phrases you want to monitor, such as your company name. (Type your search, then click the [Search Blogs] button.)
   
3. Treat the search results page as you would any blog to which you wanted to subscribe with your blog monitoring service. For example, Bloglines has a [Sub with Bloglines] button I can add to my browser. So from the results page, I would simply click that button, and -- presto, change-o -- I'd be subscribed.

From that point on, Google's blog search, in combination with your monitoring service, will tell you any time a new blog post meets your search criteria. Just check your blog monitoring service on a daily basis, and you'll stay ahead of the pack.

Technology may be grand, but free technology is grander.

--
Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association