Forensic and Competitive Intelligence Session at PubCon Vegas 2007
By Igor Mordkovich on Dec 8, 2006 in PubCon, Marketing Strategy, General
The following are ideas gathered from this session.
Rob Garner suggests securing all possible misspelling of your domain name.
Andy Beal suggests using Technorati RSS alert for competitor monitoring
Yahoo alerts is another way of keeping a close eye on the news generated around your competition or your own site
Copernic.com is a good product to monitor competitor’s websites for changes and other relevant data.
RipOffReport.com is a good place to monitor for any cases of rip off submitted by the public
Be sure to subscribe to your competitor’s newsletters and blog feeds
Andy Beal has a good article for beginners about online reputation monitoring with tons of links to different resources.
Someone suggests using Metricsmarket.com to see an estimate of visitors to any website. After running a few tests on it I find it to be useless.
I believe Jake Bailie (one of the most interesting and entertaining speakers) suggested to do Search term gap analysis using Hitwise.
WARNING: As Jake Baillie said it … the following advise is for entertainment purposes only. Here is his advise….
Call the ISP of a competitor and ask irrelevant questions about your made up site and how it was down and some problems it created for you then move in to ask questions about your competitors
Find people who have worked for your competitors and now pissed off at them. You can learn a lot from these folks
Call your competitors and pose as if you are a “Web awards site” and start asking questions. You’ll be surprised how much stuff they’ll share with you
Crawl Google for advertiser’s keywords
Track your competitor who looks at your website. This can be done by seeing who is visiting your CACHE page as only a competitor will do this. Then record their IP address and start serving them different pages instead of your home page. Few ideas were;
- Serve them porn
- Serve them their own website
- Serve them your site but increase your prices by 50%+
- Serve them a “Not Found” page
- Serve them a blank page with some loud sounds
- ………. the list goes on.
Love the “misinformation” idea. My favorite is “Serve them their own website”.
David Temple | Dec 9, 2006 | Reply
David … how surprising will that be?
They’ll ask their attorney to send a letter to you to stop using their logo or something.
Now … pissing them off is a fun strategy. On the other hand I would urge people to take a more of a “business strategy” approach to it. Changing your prices and thus suggesting that your competition should increase their price is an excellent strategy.
This way, not only would you piss them off but you would be winning more customers.
Igor Mordkovich | Dec 9, 2006 | Reply