Competitive intelligence and internet visibility

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You might call it competitive intelligence.

Yesterday the COO of the company asked me to search the internet far and wide for any information about a certain company. I spent about two hours searching across as many search engines as I could find, and had a friend with a paid subscription to ZoomInfo do a search for me. I also searched the Thomas Register, Jigsaw.com, the Yellow Pages, Reuters, US Newswire, and in social networking sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Digg and the like.

I found a link on the NewPR Wiki about What Companies Should Monitor and used that as a resource for places to search.

While I was somewhat fruitful, I found I really enjoyed the opportunity to play detective for a little while. The company could have instructed me to sign up for some paid services, but they were looking for some quick information.

It also taught me a lesson about making oneself visible. This company has apparently done a fantastic job of making itself invisible. Contrast that to a Google search done on “Daniel Johnson, Jr.” Aside from a Canadian politician of the same name, most of the top results are related to me, which excites me a lot.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 2:29 pm and is filed under branding, case studies, competitive intelligence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

salguod

It’s interesting to me how some sites seem to be unaware of how they should pay attention to being ‘searchable’ My own company’s site is reliant on flash and images, meaning that doing a search, even of the site, doesnt turn up much. Not good for helping folks find you.

I recently emailed DJ on how his site doesn’t seem to be getting good indexing either. A Google search for ‘Douglas Jacoby baptism’, for example, doesn’t come up with any links to his actual website, even though he’s written quite a bit about it.
salguod

I stand corrected. Google now shows a link to his site at the top of the list. I guess that recent redo of his site helped and it just hadn’t shown up on Google when I emailed him.

Good for him.