Pet sitters? Poster-sharing? Party-hopping? Intelligence through Social Networks may become the new competitive intelligence reality
Recently, I attended an unusual (and unusually dynamic) conference sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum. Wow, what a carnival of ideas paraded through the halls that day! Bear with me for a moment and I will reveal the reason for this seemingly odd stream of thought.
Pawspot.com had a message for this audience, as its founders handed out postcards that read, “Pet people are a unique breed. That’s why when it comes to pet care, a pet person always makes the best pet sitter. At pawspot.com, you and your pet-loving friends have an easy way to interact and exchange pet care services…” A people network of pet lovers who will share information with one another has been born.
Compete.com is a website where consumers share their “clicks” with one another in order to produce better, spyware-free, search results. Tabblo.com (pronounced Tableau) is a way for groups to share picture and word stories about their personal lives. As the website’s CEO, Antonio Rodriguez tells his audience, he started this site because he did not see a “good online application for putting together photos and words with styled templates that can be customized by the author for the purpose of telling a story.” Sharing pictures and stories, what’s next?
In recent years, those seeking intelligence on their competitors look for a lot of connecting dots. You hopped from a Security and Exchange Commission 10-K filing, to a news article from The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, then to blog or discussion forum on the same company or competitive issue. You hopped from point to point, connecting these dots.
The path you followed was not necessarily a series of straight lines but rather a pattern that looks something like a big city subway system map. You hop on one subway line then leave the train at a particular station and change to another subway line heading in a different direction, and so on until you arrive at your destination. This intelligence-gathering approach based on the Internet has worked well for over a decade now.
The process is about to change. The intelligence world on the Web seems to have morphed from a subway map to groups of planetary orbits. Social networks have become a powerful force on the Net. People with like minds or interests find each other and form groups. Sometimes these circles or ellipses overlap; sometimes they run around each other. No longer the linear listservs we have grown so used to since the 1990s, but rather large chat rooms, filled with pictures, blogs within blogs, invitations to events, special clubs for which you need an invitation.
Clubs like Pawspot and Tabblo are protected social communities. These circles are private and may not be open to inspection by Google. Enter these social focus groups and you are privy to lots of loose, socially important insights. Remain an outsider and you will see only what outsiders see, or what Google lets you see through its massive search engine.
You may not be a pet lover but I guarantee you there are social networking communities out there – corporate groups – you need to watch and join.
No Swiss Army Knife, Please!…A new Pharmaceutical intelligence index may beat Google
Google is like a Swiss army knife. It has many neat little tools, but you can waste a lot of time trying to fix a problem. Have you ever opened a Swiss Army knife? Pretty impressive, no? It has a screwdriver, a file, a scissor, an awl, a corkscrew, a pen, tweezers, a can opener, a small flashlight, and so on. All these tools work to a degree; certainly they are wonderful to have when you need them in a pinch. Yet, they are far from perfect, and mostly a compromise. The same goes for Google, a powerful package but not always the right solution for your intelligence challenge.
Google can only help you find what you know is there. The more specific the need, the less helpful Google may be. For example, if you had to find the half-dozen most reliable Web sites for clinical trials around the world, would you know to go to the CMR International listing of trials in the United Kingdom, or CenterWatch–a listing of clinical trials worldwide? What if you needed to test some wild ideas about a rival you by reviewing a few key blogs? Which blogs? DrugWonks? Patent Baristas?
That is the reason my staff designed the Pharma-Healthcare I3 (Internet Intelligence Index). We spent nearly a year sifting through thousands of Internet sources to distill the 250-plus most valuable sources. You will find these sources neatly collapsed under a dozen well-reasoned categories, organized the way someone in the pharma or biotech businesses might use them. Google does not pre-invest time in your industry. It’s a master index that works by mathematical formulas. While it does a good job, it’s just a Swiss Army knife.
I recommend you give this new tool a try and see how much time it can save you. Remember, dedicated tools are often far more valuable than the one general, all-purpose devise. Take a look at the Pharma-Healthcare I3 and you won’t need the cork screw, nail file and flashlight that are thrown in for good measure.
The War Game for the Virtual Community. MySpace v. The World. Will the battle ever end?
War games or strategy games imply that someone wins, someone loses. But when it comes to the social networking sites–MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, or Second Life – seeking a winner in a face-to-face strategic battle may miss the point.
On March 6, 2007, Fuld & Company will run its fifth public war game, this time at the London Business School. The teams will all have a well-defined 50-plus page briefing book on the competitors. More than 40 LBS Sloan graduate students and Executive MBAs at the school will represent each of the four companies listed above. The winning team will receive a cash prize.
The truth is that planet earth has never felt smaller, or more intimate. With the explosion of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, a parallel social experiment began. Thousands upon thousands of virtual communities have sprung up, claiming millions of members in a number of instances. There is the gargantuan MySpace with 130 million, Second Life with 3 million, Friendster’s 29 million, Facebook’s 12 million. There are also smaller specialty communities including, Care2 with 6.6 million individuals who believe in “Green living and activism,” Draugiem.lv with over 700,000 members whose focus is Latvia, and Flickr with 2.5 million members who share photos with one another.
How do the enormous media-owned sites recoup their investments? Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million and Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. NewsCorp’s owner and its Fox Interactive Media division, the place where MySpace resides, anticipated generating a half-billion dollars by the end of fiscal 2007, a fraction of the $26 billion for the company as a whole. How can Rupert Murdoch, grow MySpace’s revenue enough to make up for falling revenues in its traditional newspaper business? At the same time, will Google’s video virtual community of YouTube truly hold its members together long enough to click through all that advertising?
The battle for the virtual community has just been born, but the future for these entities is filled with questions. Who is going to win this battle? Will it be the first-to-market networks? Being first does not always guarantee you will make it to the finish line? How much loyalty do virtual community members have to a particular site? Are they members of more than one site? How can YouTube, MySpace, Second Life or Facebook retain their memberships – long enough to recoup their investments?
What is the real point here? Why are war games so important? War games, or strategy games, provide a view into your market’s immediate future. If you run it right, no one actually wins (yes, we do declare a winner in the classroom game). What you really learn is what your rival is likely to do next and how to best respond. Past games with these business schools have accurately predicted the introduction of Apple’s iTV, or Google’s and Microsoft’s pursuit of AOL a couple of years ago. Our game participants predicted the staying power of News Corp and the fact that the latest iPod may not be as powerful as pure content. Rupert Murdoch has sure taught the world that fact.
No one actually “wins” in a war game but everyone gains competitive insight.
Tune in next month when we tell you what happened to our intrepid business school students and the futures they predicted for MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Second Life. Watch them use their creativity to anticipate strategic moves in this rapidly shifting market. That’s the point. Let the battle begin!
When Companies Lose Competitive Memory
Companies suffer from a type of corporate dementia, plain and simple. This fact is both dangerous and scary at the same time.
I recently was the keynote at a pharmaceutical conference in Europe. Such a stage gives the speaker many options for having a conversation with his audience. My purpose was to review the past decade in competitive intelligence within the pharmaceutical industry. It was a challenge. But the most important lesson of that day was one the audience helped supply.
The topic was fascinating. I quickly reviewed the progress in technology, the movement of regulations to encourage faster drug development, thereby changing the long-term view of a drug because of a greater market life before its patent expires. All these factors, including the rise of the Internet, contributed to a changed competitive landscape over the last decade. As it tied into my theme, these changes affect the way you watch your competition as well, and the types of questions you ask. This, though, was not the real lesson learned.
I turned to my audience and asked them mid-way through, “How many of you govern your intelligence function?” Mind you, the majority represented large pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Most responded by saying that one or two full-time staff led the intelligence group within their corporation or mega-division. That, in and of itself, was not disturbing. It was the next question they answered that rattled me.
When I asked the audience how many of them had intelligence programs that were older than a few years, fewer than a half-dozen raised their hands – out of approximately 60 in the audience.
Okay, you say, this is a new function. Unfortunately, I knew better. In fact, most of those in the audience work in companies that have had intelligence programs, of one sort or another, for more than ten or fifteen years. I knew this because I have taught their predecessors over the years. The problem I confronted that day was that this group has somehow been appointed to restart a dead or dying program, and was unaware of the preceding competitive intelligence organization.
Management books discuss “corporate memory.” It’s a broad topic. My concern is that companies and their managements lose more than corporate memory, they lose competitive memory. If these companies are any indication (and they are based on the “Vanishing CI Unit,” survey we conducted in 1999 on the same topic, yielding roughly the same results as this crude show of hands (have a link to the survey or other info on your site?), corporations are playing with CI. They build, then dismiss or reduce this function time and time again.
It’s a dangerous move. The overhead generated by such CI units are miniscule to a large corporation; yet, these units act as nerve centers for tracking and staying ahead of the competition.
In my latest book, The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence (Crown Publishing, 2006), I describe in story after story how it takes a combination of common sense and – most important – dedication to keep a competitive intelligence program running and succeeding within a company. The investment is relatively low, but the payback is enormous. Just ask Novartis, Dial, Corning, Visa, Fuji and other companies with great ROI in this area.
The cure for competitive dementia, I told this audience, was not more headcount, but keeping the headcount you have and building a base of competitive knowledge, year after year. That is how you exercise the competitive mind and stay on top of your rivals.
Does Innovation Come from the Business Schools Where’s the real intelligence?
What kinds of executives are best equipped to handle the emerging virtual communities increasingly dominating the Internet?
I ask that question because I recently had the experience of discussing the topic of the ever-growing virtual communities on the Internet (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook) with two very different types of students–those seeking an MBA, and those completing a Masters program in product design.
Both groups found the topic enthralling. That is where commonality ended. I’m not sure which type school has the better approach to making a market for this new concept; I only know that they are different. My fear is that industry does not recognize these differences, acknowledging the left-brain, MBA analyst type over the right-brain, so-called artiste, the designer.
The very best MBAs the ones who think ahead and plan ahead for their companies, always will be in demand. Are these the only kinds of talents industry needs? MBAs are taught to see intelligence through spreadsheets, business cases, often measuring future success based on past experience.
Designers represent a very different breed of thinker, one that business can use but rarely places in the forefront of company leadership. It seems to me that designers are taught to build on past experience but also to sometimes throw it out the window in favor of new ideas and different concepts, when called for.
Just compare Kevin Rollins, former Chief Executive of Dell, with Steven Jobs, head of Apple. Rollins is a business school graduate and alum of the global consulting firm, Bain & Company. He was selected by Michael Dell, company founder, to run his company. Dell encountered market share losses for 18 months, finally forcing Dell to fire Rollins. Rollins had a solid track record, but when market conditions changed he appeared unable to move outside the system Dell needed to change. While Dell is in a commodity type business, with ever lowering prices, it too must innovate in order to stay in sync with its market.
Contrast Rollins with Steven Jobs, head of Apple. Not a business-type in the traditional sense, Jobs has gravitated to the design side. He offers magic, thinks about products that the market had not yet called for but where he has identified gaps. The MP3 player, for instance, was around long before the iPod was born. Jobs just wanted to give the world both better hardware and the technology to make the hardware work. He built a new entertainment ecosystem, called iTunes. While Apple’s market share is relatively small in the technology world, Jobs has made Apple an innovation leader and a very profitable one at that.
MBAs of the world, you are not industry’s only future. Intelligence is about seeing ahead, shaping change through discreet marketplace knowledge. Spreadsheets and business cases are about reviewing the past. Yet sometimes industry may be better off when the Designers take control.
