Assignment 2

Competitive Intelligence Communities

Cristin McVey

July 5, 2020

San Jose State University

Info 282-13
Competitive Intelligence Communities

Abstract

Competitive intelligence (CI) communities rely on social media to assess risks and

opportunities in the external business environment and monitor their competitors, their suppliers

and emerging business trends. In addition to monitoring its own presence in the external business

environment, companies can cross-monitor the social media presence of its competitors to glean

intelligence on competitor strategies and shifts in the organization. CI communities, however,

must stay current in terms of how the intelligence is gathered (the tools, dashboards, etc) as well

as how to apply this knowledge within the overall business intelligence strategy. Businesses and

organizations, therefore, must increasingly invest robust resources into strategies for collecting

and processing this data. The benefits of social media tools for CI communities are clear and far-

reaching and will remain a permanent component of the overall business intelligence strategy for

companies and organizations.

            

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Competitive Intelligence Communities

Competitive intelligence (CI) communities rely on social media to assess risks and

opportunities in the external business environment and monitor their competitors, their suppliers

and emerging business trends. Social media outlets range from discussion and comment forums

to blogs to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Increasingly,

companies themselves create multiple social media accounts to capture these consumer

sentiments and opinions for competitive intelligence. For example, Vitacost, a company I

researched for a previous discussion, has a social media presence through five channels:

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. While these channels are helpful for

marketing and promoting products and services and creating a cohesive brand identity, they are

extremely helpful for competitors to get a sense of the company’s business strategy—in other

words—valuable CI.

One advantage of social media is that information about competitors and suppliers is

readily available. Fan & Gordon (2014) point out that gathering “business intelligence from

social media about suppliers or competitors (in all they do) is almost as easy for a business as

monitoring its own affairs”. Additionally, social media offer businesses an “early signal

analysis” that gives necessary information about competitors and the changing landscape of the

business environment before it becomes well-known by others. Social media platforms provide

businesses the “listening” (one might say “eavesdropping”) tools to gather intelligence on an

array of metrics that previous to Web 2.0 would have been difficult, if not impossible, to capture.

Without employing social media information tools, businesses can easily miss out on identifying

trends in a timely manner or protect against risks that could compromise brand identity

(Meredith & O’Donnell, 2011). 

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Competitive Intelligence Communities

In addition to monitoring its own presence in the external business environment,

companies can cross-monitor the social media presence of its competitors to glean intelligence

on their strategies and shifts in the organization. Leidig (2019) emphasizes the versatility of

social media tools in terms of the array of information gathered, such as consumer behavior,

trending topics, consumer preferences, and brand sentiment. For example, on the micro-level

companies can explore text mining of key words, data mining and other analytics (Olszak, 2013)

to stay on top of current trends. Social media analytics is a broad and deep field that can be

tailored to very specific data points using opinion mining, topic modeling, social network

analysis and more (Fan & Gordon, 2014). CI communities must stay current in terms of how the

intelligence is gathered (the tools, dashboards, etc) as well as how to apply this knowledge

within the overall business intelligence strategy.

Businesses and organizations, therefore, must increasingly invest robust resources into

strategies for collecting and processing this data. Olszak (2013) discusses a CI model that

encompasses three areas: first, tools for the exploitation and exploration of the current and new

sources of data; second, building data models to enable predict and optimize business

performance; third, applying CI to transform business operations. Additionally, CI tools are not

static—what began as an exploration tool can become an exploitation tool later. As Leidig

(2019) points out: Not all data, however, is necessarily intelligence.

Not every bit of competitive intelligence presents an opportunity, of course – but the

amount of insight readily available is astounding. Dismissing the ability to compare

multiple brands across key social metrics, leaves tactical and strategic competitive

advantages on the table for someone else to scoop up.

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Competitive Intelligence Communities

CI communities, therefore, must create frameworks that funnels information gathered

from social media tools into actionable business strategies (Olszak, 2013). As a result, many

companies invest heavily in social media analytics programs and robust dashboards for sifting

through the “noise” to find the valuable “nuggets” of competitive intelligence. Within the various

“stages” (Hakansson & Nelke, 2015) of competitive intelligence—planning, collection, analysis

and dissemination—social media is the most differentiated from earlier pre-Web 2.0 forms of

competitive intelligence in the potentials for collection (there is so much out there!) and the ever-

increasing and sophisticated tools available for analysis of the this data. With over 1.5 billion

conversations an hour, many businesses “recognize that social media might lead them to a better

understanding of what their customers think and want, but struggle to understand how they can

get the right information that will help them make money” (Fan & Gordon, 2014).

Even small businesses and libraries would benefit from finding ways to take advantage of

the types of intelligence that social media provides (Iwu-James, et al., 2019). Exploring the

social media channels of other libraries, especially ones that overlap in service communities, can

help frame the introduction (or necessity) of new programs and resources. In a “crowded” space,

social media can help an organization clarify its “message” based on its strengths, risks and

current opportunities (Brooks, et al., 2014) in a more discreet and timesaving manner compared

to other forms of engagement, such as professional networking, visiting on-site, or analyzing in-

house marketing. The benefits of social media tools for CI communities are clear and far-

reaching and will remain a permanent component of the overall business intelligence strategy for

companies and organizations.

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Competitive Intelligence Communities

References

Brooks, G., Heffner, A. & Henderson, D. (2014 June). A SWOT analysis of competitive

knowledge from social media for a small start-up business. Review of Business

Information Systems, 18 (1), 23-32.

Fan, W. & Gordon, M. D. (2014). The power of social media analytics. Communications of the

ACM, 57(6), 74-81.

Hakansson, C., & Nelke, M. (2015). Competitive intelligence from start to end. In Competitive

intelligence for information professionals. Cambridge: Chandos Publishing. Retrieved

from https://doi-org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100206-3.00003-4

Iwu-James, J., Haliso, Y. & Ifijeh, G. (2020) Leveraging competitive intelligence for successful

marketing of academic library services, New Review of Academic

Librarianship, 26,1, 151-164.

Leidig, P. (2019, June 19). Using social media insight to inform competitive intelligence.

Netbase. Retrieved from https://www.netbase.com/blog/social-media-insight-

competitive-intelligence/

Meredith, R. & O’Donnell, P. (2011). A framework for understanding the role social media in

business intelligence systems. Decision Making in Web 2.0, 263-282.

Olszak, C. (2013). Multi-agent framework for social customer relationship management systems.

In E. Cohen & E. Boyd (Eds.), Proceedings of Proceedings of the Informing Science and

Information Technology Education Conference 2013 (pp. 367-387). Informing Science

Institute. Retrieved from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/114664/