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Leadership Skills: Understanding the Competition (Part 1 of 2)
By Marian Cook



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And now a few high level competitive intelligence sources for your consideration:
    1. Talk to people within your own company. New employees from competitors, sales people, purchasing agents and accounts payable personnel all may have valuable information.

    2. An easy way to gather information is to use several tools that will send it to your inbox automatically. Clipping services such as CustomScoop and BurrellesLuce offer, for a fee, clipping and media analysis services. You can also set up a keyword-based email news feed from Google Alerts for free.

    3. Search past articles for free at MagPortal and FindArticles. Factiva, Dialog and LexisNexis are more in-depth but there is a subscription fee.

    4. Use job sites and resources such as www.monster.com and www.linkedin.com to get a picture of who is hiring what kinds of people. This could indicate a new initiative or shift in your competitor’s business. Please be cautious of doing it on your company’s email address. Sometimes those are watched by your own company and it could be assumed you are looking for a job when you are not.

    5. PR Newswire, News Alert, News Index, and Industry Watch are all proven sources for press releases and trade publications.

    6. Google's blog search engine, as well as others, enable free searches of blog posts. A word of caution here, however. While some bloggers have quite a following, reading blogs can be an entertaining activity that wastes a great deal of time. Reliability and relevance are not guaranteed. Anyone with any agenda can say anything, and they do. So do some initial review and keep your critical eyes open – and watching the time you spend on it.
The next article will talk about additional sources of competitor information for both public and private. Do you have a source you would recommend? Share it in an email to mcook@ageos1.com!

Part 1 | Part 2

By Marian Cook, Sr. Strategist and Leadership Development Consultant, mcook@ageos1.com