Using the Internet & Online Sources for Competitive Intelligence

Arthur Weiss, AWARE
Full-Day Workshop

Arthur Weiss has written and lectured widely on a variety of CI topics, including a column in SCIP's Competitive Intelligence Magazine. His background in CI goes back to the 1980s where he worked as the marketing intelligence manager for D&B Europe. In 1995 he set up AWARE and in 1997 he led the world's first workshop on "Using the Internet for Competitive Intelligence" given at the 1997 International Online Information conference. He has led highly rated workshops on CI and the Internet at SCIP and other industry events.

Using the Internet & Online Sources for Competitive Intelligence

Description:
This workshop will look at how, why, and when the Internet and online sources should be used for competitive intelligence research. The workshop will examine various Web search tools and the range of online sources, and their differences, and provide advanced techniques for finding information. The morning portion covers how search engines work, why key information may not be found in the first 100 hits of a simple search, and how it can be found, including the use of deep Web searches. The session will cover: specialist tools for finding information on people, news, and selected industries; when to pay for information and what to pay for; evaluating the quality of Web-based material; finding new developments; and when to stop, move on and use primary research approaches. The afternoon session will build on the morning session, looking at ways of benchmarking a competitor's Web presence, and techniques for finding hidden information on Web pages, unindexed pages, and Web promotional strategies. In addition, we will work through more in-depth examples showing the ways that online sources and the Internet can provide valuable and actionable competitive intelligence and also inform and improve primary research - ranging from topic familiarization, identifying potential interview contacts, and obtaining available financial and product data on different types of organization. Both the morning and afternoon workshop segments will include a range of case studies and examples to illustrate the learning points.

Workshop Goals: 

• Recognize the types of CI that can be found online, and what can't, how to use the results to inform primary research, and when to move onto primary research
• Discover techniques for finding CI, using online sources, that go beyond basic Internet search tools such as Google including specialist search engines, deep Web sources and pay-to-use sources
• Learn ways of using the Internet and online sources to analyse a competitor, seeking hidden intelligence that may not be immediately seen by casual searchers