My first job in educational publishing was Product Manager for Butterick Publishing, a pattern-maker that created educational materials for Home Economics teachers. Every time I went to "man" the booth at an educational exhibit, one of my responsibilities was to gather competitive information from the companies at the exhibit. I would do this by collecting catalogs and by talking with the other marketing people at the show. As a marketer, I was interested in finding out:

What new products were entering the market.
How were these product priced.
What new "offers" were being made by my competition.
How did their promotional materials compare to my company's materials.

Now, with most publisher's on the Internet, competitive intelligence gathering has been made easier and more comprehensive than ever before. Here's a program that I recommend you institute within your company to help you keep up with your competition on a regular basis.

Step 1

Identify 5-10 of your leading competitors and visit their web sites once a month. Review the "about the company" page and their "mission" statements. These pages will tell you a lot about their future strategy and direction as well as the quality and background of their senior officers. Check out the press release section to review current events at the company. Begin tracking what information they have posted on their site. Sign up for their newsletters. Order products from their site. Track what they do to follow-up Internet-generated new customers. Not only will you become smarter about your competitors, but you will glean new marketing ideas as well.

Step 2

Once every quarter, go to the search engine http://www.hotbot.com and type in the complete URL for each of your competitors. Select "Links to this URL" instead of "All the Words" in the dropdown menu located directly under the place where you type in the URL. This will generate a list of all the web sites that are "linked" to your competitor's site. Visit each one of these sites and request a link to your company's site. Don't forget to check out the links section on each of these sites since these will lead you to other web sites where links to your company's site might also be appropriate.

Step 3

Once a month, go to http://www.deja.com and search for messages containing your competitor's name and/or best-known product titles. The results will point you to discussion groups and lists that are probably comprised of potential customers and if they are talking about your competitors, you need to find a way for them to talk about you!
And, now that I've told you how to gather information about your competitors, check out your own web site to see just how much information you are giving away to your competitors!