I am enjoying David Meerman Scott’s book, Real-Time Marketing & PR. He explains the competitive advantage to companies and individuals of being responsive to events that affect them in real-time. No longer can you just monitor the news: you have to take action! So many companies are stuck in the past and the future and forget that we operate in the NOW!
Read about 10 top tips recommended by Arthur Weiss of Aware shared in a recent AIIP webinar. These will help you no matter what type of research you do. Aside from sharing some great websites, browsers, social networks and Internet people sites, I like Arthur’s framing of research. Learn exactly what you are looking for and put yourself in the target company’s place as plan for and conduct the research. Also think laterally. Look for oddities and things that don’t look, feel or sound right.
How do you assess the reliability of your human sources? I consider their motivation to know what you’re trying to learn as a primary yardstick towards reliability, although people don’t always tell the truth or in the spirit of trying to be helpful when they don’t know…they unintentionally misinform. What’s been your experience?
Recently, I wrote about the Extreme Presentation format for presenting material to smaller audiences. At the conclusion of that post, I gave an example of how Extreme Presentation looks. This post describes and illustrates an example of Extreme Presentation by defining what and how to use cooperative intelligence in competitive intelligence or research.
Dr. Andrew Abela recently wrote a second book on Extreme Presentation. The first book detailed how to create an Extreme Presentation while this book provides a simple case study which illustrates clearly how Extreme Presentation can be created at companies, particularly for smaller audiences. It’s powerful as most of us present to small audiences, and usually want to persuade them to take a certain course of action. This is the objective of Extreme Presentation.
Tactic #5: Remain ethical and avoid deception as you collect competitive information. As a consultant I am sensitive to the topic of ethics since there is such a variance among my clients. Some clients have the attitude of “Just get the information for us, I don’t care how!” Others go as far as to have me sign on to their company ethical standards. I find that having an honest discussion around ethics at the proposal stage is helpful so I can decide if my ethics and the company’s are similar. Ultimately it’s your conscience that will guide your behavior and ethics is part of that.
I was interviewed by Adam Sutton of MarketingSherpa, and in the spirit of cooperative intelligence I am sharing some highlights from each of the 5 tactics to research your marketplace using competitive intelligence skills. 1. Conduct win loss analysis; 2. Talk to internal and external experts; 3. Use trade shows as fact-finding missions 4. Build an information database 5. Remain ethical and avoid deception. I will provide more detail about each of these 5 tactics in future April blogs.
In honor of my competitive intelligence colleague, Jonathan Calof, 2010 SCIP Fellow winner, I am writing this post on his subject of expertise, trade shows! Trade shows are one of the best venues for cooperative intelligence practices since if you display cooperative connection and communication skills, the floodgates of knowledge will be yours!
On March 23, I will be giving a 2 hour session entitled, “Improve your ROI: Proven Tools & Techniques for Integrating Sales & Marketing” at the American Marketing Association’s Spring Marketing Workshop which takes place in Denver, Colorado from March 22 – 25 at the Westin Tabor Center www.westintaborcenterdenver.com.
In the spirit of cooperative intelligence I want to share the news about our SCIP Denver Rocky Mountain Meeting for Feb 19 2010 at the Qwest Bldg, 1801 California St, Conf Rm 3, 13th Fl, Denver CO 80202. Lynnette Woolery, our long-time chapter leader will hand the reins over to Richard Caldwell and Tom Seward.