Comme promis il y a quelques semaines, et dans la suite de la nouvelle ligne éditoriale de ‘Demain la veille’, j’inaugure aujourd’hui la nouvelle rubrique ’5 questions à’ avec l’invité d’honneur August Jackson, des Etats-Unis, qui nous parlera de réseaux sociaux et de competitive intelligence. Le contenu est en anglais, j’ai évité volontairement la traduction pour ne pas vous faire perdre de sa richesse

Pour la prochaine interview, nous resterons aux Etats-Unis, et on ira du côté des libraries et notamment celle de l’Université de la Floride du Sud.  Si vous avez d’autres propositions de personnes/entités à interviewer, faites moi signe

1- A short presentation of you, your job, interests…

I’ve been in competitive intelligence since 2000. I started in CI at Concert, a joint venture of British Telecom and AT&T. I had a lot to learn and thankfully a great manager. When the telecom bubble burst and our budget was severely cut we had to get very smart about how to do low-cost CI. That’s when I started to focus a lot of my attention to how to best conduct Internet research. I think having that experience made me a better CI researcher and analyst. I joined the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) to build my skills. Since then I’ve developed methods for using Internet resources to research private companies and how CI professionals can use RSS to increase the diversity of their information resources.

Now I’m at Verizon, which is the second largest telecommunications company (by revenue) in the United States and a provider of enterprise telecommunications services worldwide. In addition to my role as a CI analyst I’m an active evangelist for using web 2.0 tools to increase opportunities for collaboration and improve efficiency.

I produce the Competitive Intelligence Podcast. If any of your readers are interested they can visit the podcast home page at http://www.cipodcast.com. I also have my own blog where I write about CI, telecom and information technology at http://www.augustjackson.net. I’m a regular on Twitter, and my Twitter name is « 8of12. »

2- How can CI professionals take advantage from social medias

Social media is a great tool for CI professionals to conduct primary research. Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter make it very easy to research companies and identify subject matter experts.

LinkedIn company profiles include information on from what companies a firm hires and to what companies employees go after working at the company. The company profile also includes recent hires, promotions and job changes. Those are very valuable insights into a company’s priorities and the state of affairs. For example:

1. This can reveal new technical or managerial priorities. Is the firm hiring for a specific skill set?
2. This profile can reveal whether or not the firm have expansion plans. Hare they hiring in a new country or city where they do not currently have operations?
3. If the firm is having personnel challenges this will be revealed in the company profile. Hhas the pace of departures changed?
4. The company profile for a firm and its competitors will reveal any changing positions in a competitive market. Is a specific competitor losing key employees to one or more rivals?

Twitter is an absolute wealth of competitive intelligence insight. There’s an active community of CI professionals tweeting, so you can use Twitter to expand your own professional network and learn more about CI. You can also find subject matter experts, competitors’ employees, customers, analysts and journalists. CI professionals should take a look at search.twitter.com to look for their own company, their competitors and any technical terms used in their industry for a start. They don’t need to even have their own Twitter account to search twitter.

I’ve been an active advocate for CI professionals to use RSS to expand their information sources create their own stream of up-to-date information. CI researchers can create their own custom RSS feeds from Twitter searches that they create, Your readers can see a presentation on RSS that I delivered for the Special Libraries Association in June here: http://augustjackson.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/my-rss-presentation-for-the-sla-conference/.

Last September I did an interview with Suki Fuller about how CI professionals can use social media for episode 23 of the Competitive Intelligence Podcast. Episode 20 was an interview with Roger Phelps on how to use LinkedIn to find primary sources. These interviews provide a great deal of information, tips and tricks about how CI professionals can use both Twitter and LinkedIn as great sources for research and expert identification.

We can also use social media to diversify the delivery of our intelligence products to our customers inside our companies, make products that are easier to update based on changing information and collaborate with field staff that can themselves be great sources of information. I’m always amazed by the competitive knowledge sales staff have because they are talking to customers who are talking directly to competitors. These people talk to one another, and usually anything CI professionals can do to bring these valuable sources closer to our CI product helps make those products better and increase our credibility. Episode 21 of the CI podcast was an interview with Daniel Bukowski and Michael Leyden about their experience using a wiki to create intelligence products when they were students at the Mercyhurst Institute for Intelligence Studies. They told me about some of the very innovative and exciting things that they were able to do on that wiki project.

3- Social media for firms : risks and advantages

Companies’ major concerns about social media are usually focused on employees sharing sensitive information or embarrassing the firm. Several firms in the US have had videos of employees behaving badly or incompetently posted on YouTube. These incidents have led the public to question some company’s quality standards, and the public has also begun to judge companies by how they respond to these incidents. So far concerns over damage to brands are more justified than actual exposure of proprietary information. While I don’t have any direct data to support this, my hypothesis is that most employees with access to truly proprietary information are either sufficiently aware or properly trained to protect that information.

Marketing executives are extremely concerned about the risk to brands, and that seems to keep many companies from actively pursuing social media as part of a marketing strategy. Social media has exposed a reality about brands: your customers own the brand. Companies are going to need to engage in social media because their customers are going to discuss their brands in social media whether the company is part of the conversation or not.

Social media marketing definitely presents opportunities, particularly for companies and brands that are not the top in their given market. The ability to target distinct customer segments closely through search advertising, social network advertising and actual social engagement campaigns can give them a high return on their marketing investment. This can blunt the advantage of a market leader in a consumer brand. A company can build a niche market and possibly compete on a scale that would not even elicit a response from the market leader.

Another opportunity that some firms are beginning to realize for social media is the ability to deliver high-touch customer service. ComcastCares on Twitter is a great example of this. Comcast is an American company that provides television, broadband Internet and consumer land-line telephone services. The cable industry does not have a strong reputation for providing quality customer service. An enterprising employee at Comcast was monitoring customer complaints on Twitter and decided to begin offering advice and resolution to customers’ problems. This has given Comcast a lot of positive attention and given the company and customers great stories to tell about how customer problems were resolved satisfactorily. Many companies are using Twitter in this same way now.

4-  Some success keys for implementing CI strategy

One of the things that is most important for CI professionals to do is to focus on the business decisions that their internal customers need to make. What keeps them up at night? What are the main challenges they face? These customer needs should help guide which analytical tools you’ll use and which products you’ll deliver to them. You’ll also want to understand what analytical frameworks your customers respect, and many of the executives I’ve worked with respond very favorably to SWOT analysis.

Sometimes you might also perceive long-term strategic challenges that the executives you support do not see. It can be very easy for managers and executives to get very focused on day-to-day execution. Communicating these longer-term strategic issues can be a communications challenge. Often through our analysis we reach conclusions that conflict with long-held beliefs about an industry. Those beliefs won’t change with a single presentation. Delivering the conclusions of strategic analysis that conflict with such long-held beliefs is something that has to be well-planned. You’ll need to develop a marketing plan for your conclusions.

In his blog Strategically Thinking J.T. Hawes lists out his 15 steps for Competitive Intelligence success. He’s done a very thorough job of outlining what he thinks are the keys to success, and you can see this for yourself at http://blog.jthawes.com/2009/05/08/the-human-side-of-competitive-intelligence/.

5-  What about french CI

This is an interesting question, and I have to first admit that my impression of French CI has been formed over time based in part by American stereotypes of the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and French approach to business and economics. I hope your readers will excuse my ignorance. In an effort to give this question a more informed answer I have conducted some research. My most utilized source was the article « The Emergence and Uniqueness of Competitive Intelligence in France » by Jamie Smith and Leïla Kossou in the Journal of Competitive Intelligence Management (2008, Volume 4, Number 3). The article in part confirms what I had always believed about CI in France and also presents some facts that force me to re-think some of my previous conclusions on the topic.

Stereotypically Anglo-Americans regard French and indeed other continental European politicians and business leaders as being focused on stakeholder priorities other than those of the shareholders, generally prioritizing the state (itself a large shareholder in many of the largest enterprises) and employees (the 35-hour work week and 5 weeks of paid vacation being noteworthy examples ). By contrast the Anglo-American model prioritizes the shareholders above all other stakeholders.

The American model historically rejects an extensive role for government in day-to-day economic activities. Federal government ownership of institutions such as AIG, General Motors and Chrysler that have come about because of the current economic crisis and are a major shift away from Americans’ traditional view of government’s proper role in economic activity. These policies are extremely unpopular among Americans who hold to the traditional shareholder view of business. Even those who take a broader stakeholder view tend to regard the ownership by the government of these companies as examples of « crony capitalism » because government policy-makers in both the Bush and Obama administrations have been highly subjective and inconsistent in their decisions of which firms they have chosen to save.

Because the American intelligence infrastructure does not look at the domestic business environment policy-makers have been reduced to responding to waves of crisis to prevent impending catastrophe with little or no regard for long-term economic consequences. By contrast I look at the policy positions of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy and they appear to be much-better aware of the economic consequences of their policy choices during this crisis. The fact that Merkel and Sarkozy advocate for very different policies is a consequence of different priorities: Chancellor Merkel seems particularly influenced by the stereotypical German distaste for inflation, for example.

The American model of CI tends to regard the state intelligence infrastructure as separate and distinct from commercial intelligence. Historically limited sharing of information across these communities, generally limited to issues of security and legality as opposed to economic intelligence. By contrast, the French model of CI seems much more open to a state role in specific kinds of CI research and activity, and information appears to be shared more freely between government intelligence institutions and business leaders. The proposed role for the High Representative of Intelligence Economique (HRIE) in the 2003 Carayon Report is an interesting proposal that would do much to raise the profile of CI among a country’s businesses. In the US and elsewhere CI is challenged to gain the recognition it really deserves as a practice that can position organizations for long-term strategic success. When I look at proposals such as this and the competitive intelligence services offered by Industry Canada I feel a bit jealous that our practice is promoted at the notional level.

At the local level in the US Competitive Intelligence is a hot topic for local economic development agencies. This is perhaps to be expected partly because of the devolved and federal nature of government in the United States. In the past year I have had the chance to have conversations with several economic development authorities that are very savvy about CI can help them position their cities or regions for future economic growth and innovation. This approach appears to be more formal and better established in France, with the Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CCI) even going so far as to fund part of the cost for establishing CI functions inside local businesses. Still, these perspectives are sorely missing at the federal level, and there are unfortunate consequences of that. I like to highlight specific policy decisions that the United States government has taken post 9/11 that illustrate the unfortunate truth that our government leaders do not understand the long-term economic impact of policy choices, such as changes to immigration, student visas and worker visas that discourage the emigration that has been an important part of America’s ability to be an innovation leader. If our national intelligence community engaged in intelligence economique as the French do our policymakers might have known better than to implement unfortunate policies that discourage emigration and consequently blunt America’s innovation leadership.

The Obama administration has taken a potentially innovative step by instituting the role of a Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO). These roles have yet to have a clear brief defined for them, and one of the things I wonder about it whether or not these offices will be tied in to the intelligence infrastructure, specifically as it related to researching science and technology. Traditionally the S&T intelligence has been focused on questions of security and have not addressed economic issues. It will be interesting to see if the CIO or the CTO bring an economic perspective to these operations.

In conclusion, the state, regional, academic and commercial attention to Competitive Intelligence in France is very impressive and in many ways superior to how the practice has been grown and promoted in the United States. The sophistication is reflected in French government policy. While I believe there is much CI professionals in the US can learn from our French colleagues I also believe that the fundamental priorities and motivations that guide economic activity and business decision-making in the two countries would not result in a convergence of economic models.

August Jackson

august@augustjackson.net

http://www.augustjackson.net

http://www.twitter.com/8of12