NFIB

Tech Talk: How to Spy on Your Competitors—Without the Guilt
01/ 23/ 2006

If you’re like most small-business owners, you’ve probably typed the name of a competitor into Google to see what shows up. Don’t feel bad, we’ve all done it: It’s only natural to be curious about what your competitor is up to these days. Also, if you’re limiting your research to publicly available information, it’s called “intelligence,” not spying.

Big corporations spend from tens of thousands to millions of dollars each year to monitor what is being reported or discussed about them and their competitors on the Internet. For the small business without a corporate intelligence budget, there are several ways to utilize free online tools that will alert you via e-mail, or RSS news feed or desktop display whenever a word or phrase you’d like to follow appears on the Web. Here are just three examples from an endless selection:

Google News (http://news.google.com): The most popular headline news service on the Internet, Google News has a feature called “News Alerts” that allows you to set up a search query (perhaps your company’s name, a brand name or your competitor’s name) that will send you an e-mail (or an RSS news feed) whenever your keywords appear on one of the news sites Google searches. The easy-to-use service also allows you to customize how often you receive alerts.

Technorati (http://www.technorati.com): Many search engines focus exclusively on tracking what is posted on Weblogs. One of the first and most comprehensive of these services is Technorati. Several features on Technorati make it easy to track key words. In addition to alerts via RSS feeds, the service offers to registered users (it’s free) a feature called “Technorati Watchlist,” which lets you manage multiple keyword search alerts. You can limit your alerts to specific categories of Weblogs or even a specific list of Weblogs. Technorati also offers a small window you can display on your desktop (Technorati Mini) that is updated whenever blogs are updated with your keywords.

Topix.net (http://www.topix.net): This service is very similar to Google News, however it searches both news sources and Weblogs. (Yahoo! News does this also.) While you can set up personalized search alerts, Topix.net also provides thousands of category searches that already are organized by topic. So, if you’re tracking news about a specific city, industry or brand, you may discover that an alert service (RSS or e-mail alerts) on that subject already is available.

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