Webinar "Using the Internet to Research Private Companies" by August Jackson
MarkIntell.com
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August Jackson, whose competitive intelligence podcasts I have enjoyed for quite some time now gave a Webinar on internet research in context of privately held entities. Secondary research with strong web tools and expertise.
As always the event was professionally prepared by SCIP and August offered a lot of great content squeezed in one short hour. Some basics such as search engine optimization techniques (that motivate companies to publicly give away a lot of keywords and topics via their web sites) took care of the less Internet savy participants first.
Nice as well how August took away concern to even get into the source code of web pages to find detailed information in meta tags that should help the web sites to drive relevant traffic. In a classical research sense those alone are methods that can keep the competitive intelligence researcher busy for weeks if done thoroughly.
Checking on links and other relations to set a company’s web presence into context with the cometitive environment are wonderful recommendations that August spiced up with very useful links to content rich specialist sites such as LinkedIn.com or Google Scholar (I would add Google’s patents search engine even).
Many other sources such as online libraries and niche search engines were mentioned that showed how experienced August already is in utilizing the web for research to the core of any organization or topic. What I liked about his approach was the example he used throughout the presentation (Mars) and the hands-on tips to just try some stuff and see what the researcher might run into and how the findings could be valuable to the big picture and what a company’s web presence tells the researcher about them.
If you want to find more content on web research and many other topic please see August’s web site and documentations as well as his CI podcast here. Markintell features August’s CI Podcasts in our competitive intelligence podcast section as well.
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Reader Comments (3)
In the Q&A section August elaborated a bit on the major search engine's site: command. I have made great experience with web site deep searches like (e.g. in Google):
site:cnn.com IBM
or any other keyword (IBM).
Google's advances search provides great filtering and targeting as well. Especially if documents or presentations are being searched for.
The keyword meta tag I would be a bit careful with. Due to abuse by cheating web developers in the past major search engines have stopped putting weight and meaning on the keyword tags.
That might lead - over time - to many abandoned or outdated keyword tags if knowledgable webmasters focus on other search engine optimization techniques instead. Title tag (still of solid value within Google's algorithm for example) or the description tag (supporting the user as oppsode the page ranking) are still important sources for valuable and relevant key information of what a company wants to promote to the web site viewers.
Jens,
I'm glad to read that you enjoyed the webinar, and I thank you for your kind summary. It was a lot of fun, and my only concern would be that in the hour I had available to me it was difficult to find a way to dig in to the deeper meaning and analytical applications of what researchers can find about companies on-line. I tried to do this with the META tags, web registration and link analysis as best I could because I thought of all the content this would be the newest method of research to the largest number of people listening to the webinar.
The commenter (is that you as well, Jens?) makes some valid points about the downside of keywords. Another way to look at outdated keywords is that it illustrates that the company may have abandoned SEO as a marketing priority (they stopped looking at META tags) or that they are not very savvy about their web marketing (they though SEO was a one-time exercise). I see a lot of companies that do SEO badly, and that does tell us something about the company.
All the best.
That's your big strength August both in your invaluable service to the CI community and as a long standing professional: you always relate findings to the object and translate it into meaning. A habit we all should profit from when applied consitantly.
Yes, the Markintell comments are from me as well (as long as I run Markintell alone which might still happen for some time to come, except some folks want to help me to buld this resource with more brains and hands).
Thanks for stopping by, can't wait for the next CI podcast!