Are you in a position to deliver? If so, you are in a strong competitive posture. Are you aware of your capabilities vs. your competition? Do you know how to monitor your competitors performance history and the satisfaction level of your customers? If you stick your head in the sand you will most likely miss a rare opportunity to grow your business as a result of your competitors weakness. Here are some web tools and tactics that can help you gain an advantage vs. your competition:
Company Buzz: I call this tool Twitter with training wheels because it allows someone without any experience in Twitter to listen in and learn what is being said in Twitter’s conversation tunnel from your LinkedIn account.Company Buzz is found as an Application from within LinkedIn itself. You choose whether you show the results on your profile page or just for your own use on your LinkedIn home page. Simply put, you enter customer names, competitors names, brand names, prospects and even your own company name into Company Buzz data analytics for business
It will then automatically and without further effort on your part “listen in” to the Twitter flow and report back to you what is being said, good or bad, about any of the terms or names that you have entered. Be patient, you might not get the juicy details immediately, but over a period of time, you will start to get an understanding of what people are experiencing. A note of caution-you need to decide if the results of your saved searches within Company Buzz are shared with your network in the Settings area. I recommend that you uncheck the box and keep them private.
This tool has turned into my online morning newspaper. The RSS orange icon is becoming ubiquitous across most sites and services now, and you really need to learn how to use this tool to save you massive amounts of time and to provide critical information on any topic that is important to you professionally or personally. Google Reader is a free service that every person should have active, that serves as a collector of all information that you have chosen to follow by clicking on the RSS icon. iGoogle is a free service that is similar to Yahoo and other “portal pages” in that you are able to select and layout information in a format that is important to you in your preferred reading style. It is the layout tool that allows me to create my own personal online newspaper.