Redes Sociais e Inteligencia Competitiva - Um Estudo

Sobre a prática de IC com recurso às redes sociais, um estudo publicado na revista brasileira "TransInformação".

As redes sociais como instrumento estratégico para a inteligência competitiva

Adriana Rosecler Alcará, Elaine Cristina Liviero Tanzawa, Ivone Guerreiro Di Chiara, Maria Inês Tomaél, Plínio Pinto de Mendonça Uchoa Junior, Valéria Cristina Heckler, Jorge Luis Rodrigues, Sulamita da Silva Valente.

Resumo

O mapeamento das redes sociais permite a visualização das ligações entre atores no ambiente organizacional, constituindo-se, assim, importante recurso para o compartilhamento da informação e do conhecimento. Neste artigo, resultado de um estudo teórico, apresentamos as redes sociais como um dos instrumentos para
o processo de inteligência competitiva, com o objetivo de evidenciar a inter-relação entre eles e demonstrar sua complementaridade. Os resultados indicam que as redes sociais colaboram para o fortalecimento da cultura organizacional voltada para o compartilhamento da informação e do conhecimento. Além disso, o mapeamento das redes possibilita rastrear os fluxos da informação, permitindo a identificação da estrutura informacional que permeia o ambiente da organização. Assim, as redes sociais podem contribuir, de forma efetiva, para a compreensão e elaboração de melhores estratégias para o processo de inteligência competitiva e, conseqüentemente, para o funcionamento do contexto organizacional.


Abstract

Social network mapping enables the visualization of connections among actors in an organizational environment, and therefore is considered an important resource for sharing information and knowledge. As a result of a theoretical study, social networks are introduced in this article as one of the instruments for the competitive intelligence process, with the objective of making the interrelation between them evident, and showing that they supplement each other. The results of this study show that social networks cooperate with the strengthening of organizational culture, as far as sharing information and knowledge are concerned. Furthermore, network mapping enables to track down information flow, allowing an identification of the informational structure that pervades an organization’s environment. Social networks can contribute effectively to the understanding and elaboration of better strategies for the competitive intelligence process and, consequently, to the operation of the organizational context.

Acesso ao texto completo (PDF)

Gerra de Informação: Fuld War Game 2009

AFuld & Company, lider global de IC, fundada pelo guru da Inteligencia Competitiva Leonard Fuld, organizou em Abril deste o 5º "national war game championship". Desta vez, quatro das principais escolas de gestão norte-americanas (Columbia Business School Microsoft; MIT Sloan School of Management McKesson; Northwesterns Kellogg School of Management Kaiser Permanente; University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Business Allscripts), simularam uma guerra económica entre empresas das tecnologias de informação de saúde para o controlo de um sistema electrónico de registos médicos que Obama quereria implementar.



Fuld War Game 2009: The Battle for Healthcare Information

From: FuldCompany |

The Battle for Healthcare Information, held in New York City on April 3, 2009, is the fifth national war game championship organized and run by Fuld & Company, the global leader in competitive intelligence. In this public war game event, four top business schools predict the most prominent companies in the healthcare information technology and healthcare delivery industries will quickly move to create alliances and in certain cases merge with their rivals, to take advantage of the government push to adopt electronic medical records (EMRs).

Teams assumed the identity of four major healthcare icons simulating and stress testing their anticipated strategies to determine who will profit from the adoption of EMRs. The Obama administrations injecting $19 billion to kick-start this nascent electronic medical records industry just gets the players moving. It is no guarantee you will see universal adoption of electronic records in healthcare anytime soon. The teams included:

Columbia Business School Microsoft
MIT Sloan School of Management McKesson
Northwesterns Kellogg School of Management Kaiser Permanente
University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School of Business Allscripts

MITs team, simulating the McKesson strategies, won the war game competition based on four criteria: the teams strategic insight, accuracy in presenting McKessons strategy, creative ways it expressed McKessons culture and goals, and finally, its ability to project their strategic vision into the future. Last years war game on The Battle for the Wireless Internet, won by the Kellogg MBA team, successfully predicted a number of industry alliances.

Inteligencia Competitiva nas Redes Sociais

As redes sociais estão cada vez mais na moda, são o novo alvo das estratégias de marketing, mas também uma fonte de informação previligiada para saber o que as pessoas comentam (logo, pensam) sobre uma empresa, um produto, etc. Ferramentas diversas, mais sofisticadas ou menos, permitem já monitorizar de modo automático essa mesmas redes sociais e ter uma "barómetro" permanente e actual do que diferentes pessoas um pensam sobre o nossa empresa/produto.


Social media: The pathway toward gaining competitive intelligence

Tim Walker, social media manager, Hoover's Inc.
Story posted: August 17, 2009 - 6:01 am EDT




Tim Walker


Do smart b-to-b marketers use every available source of information to learn about developments in their competitive spaces? Not necessarily, according to a recent Hoover's poll gauging our audience's use of social media for gathering competitive intelligence.

The poll—which surveyed 314 marketers online in May—asked a simple question: “Does your business use social media for competitive intelligence?” It was heartening to learn that 33% of the more than 300 respondents chose the answer “Yes, we find valuable competitive information this way.” These pros grasp that people who care about their industries use blogs, Twitter, forums and other social media to talk about their companies, their competitors and the entire competitive space.

However, 21% of those polled answered, “We use social media, but not for competitive intelligence.” They're missing that boat—but not by much. If they already use social media for marketing, customer support and the like, they'll have an easy time setting up simple tools to deepen their understanding of their competitive space.

That opportunity only gets bigger for the additional 21% who said they didn't use social media at all.

Even though the ROI of social media is sometimes tricky to measure, with each passing day more companies, including savvy b-to-b companies, are building better connections with customers and prospects through social media channels. Those just venturing into the social media sphere can build parallel processes for gathering competitive intelligence right from the start. In fact, it makes perfect sense to do so, since many of the best thinkers in social media say that the first thing a company should do with social media is to listen.

EAR TO THE GROUND


Good marketers, of course, above all listen to prospects and customers, but it's easy to improve your company's ability to listen to all the players in your competitive space, including your rivals and their customers, vendors, regulators, analysts, journalists, bloggers and other mavens who influence decisions.

Most worrisome are the last 25% of respondents in our survey. These folks answered our question about competitive intelligence with this response: “What is competitive intelligence?”

My hope is that they actually do monitor their industries but simply don't call that process “competitive intelligence.” Some of them may also be small-business owners who are so in tune with their locality or niche that they don't think of CI as a separate function. At least, I hope that explains it, because the alternative—that companies are simply ignoring the competitive arenas in which they operate—is frightening.

I got a similar fright earlier this year when I made a presentation on social media to a group of competitive-intelligence professionals. The average IQ and level of experience in the room were sky-high; but it was amazing how little most of these industry veterans had even experimented with social media tools, much less used them formally.

Are you in the same boat?

B-to-b marketers have a distinct advantage when it comes to social media, whether we're using it to gather competitive intelligence or for prospecting. Since we typically deal with competitive spaces that are much smaller than the ones large retailers play in, we can carefully track the right audience of hundreds or thousands of prospects, rather than trying to keep up with millions.

SIMPLEST OF TOOLS


You can start the process with the simplest of free tools—saved searches from Google and Twitter Search that feed automatically into an RSS reader such as Google Reader. If you've resisted getting on the RSS train before, it's time to hop on board. The technology takes maybe 20 minutes to learn, but it saves you so much time afterward that you won't know how you lived without it.

Some of the social platforms, like LinkedIn, don't work with RSS, but you can get around that by saving a list of industry-relevant searches in a text file and then using cut-and-paste to work through your list quickly during research sessions. Day in and day out, this setup will bring you vital information from both the “regular” Web and from the social media sphere, and this intelligence will clue you in to new prospects, new marketplace developments and even emerging competitive threats.

Give this method 20 minutes a day and you'll be amazed at what you learn from the conversations people have in the social media about your company, your competitors and your market. (At some point, you may also want to consider such heavy-duty social media monitoring services as Radian6 or Crimson Hexagon.)