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All Along the Digital Watchtower
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by
Lee Traupel
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It's no secret interactive (web-based) marketing has
arrived. The IDC research group just released a study
in late June of this year indicating 99.9% of a survey
of executives and entrepreneurs said they currently
conduct online marketing activities, or, are in the
process of implementing or initiating some form of
interactive marketing. The problem or challenge that
many of these executives (marketing, management, etc.)
and entrepreneurs (marketing, principals, etc.) have is
how do they measure their online presence?

Most interactive marketing types, whether they are
agencies working for/with clients or in house personnel
typically just measure a company’s return for a
specific process or period of time. Many never think to
actively monitor what a company’s competitive position
is vis-à-vis Search Engines or Directory Listings, the
number of links they have pointing back to their web
site or what type of "net buzz" is being generated
(positive or negative) via the Usenet/Newsgroup
community ­ in short, it's digital warfare and the fog
of war is obscuring the battle lines.

Entrepreneurial competitive intelligence sounds like a
real mouthful, or much more than it is. Basically it's
using off the shelf tools (software or ASP services) to
understand what your page 1-3 keyword rankings are
versus your direct competitors via the top tier Search
Engines (Google, AltaVista, Excite, AOL/NetFind,
HotBot, Netscape, Magellan, Lycos, Web Crawler) and how
and where your company is listed via the blue chip
Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart, Open Directory), what’s
your link popularity (number of links pointing back to
a web site) and/or how many Usenet/Newsgroup posts are
being made about your company, products or services?
Usenet/Newsgroups can in fact be an extremely valuable
resource for unearthing competitive intelligence about
a direct competitor’s products or services ­
"Usenet/Newsgroup mining" certainly works well for
United, IBM, Microsoft and many other corporations.

These digital touch points fill in competitive
intelligence gaps and you don’t need to have an
advertising budget in the 4-6-figure range complemented
with a large staff to consistently monitor your
competitive position. You can do much of this by hand,
and or use free tools (small plug: we offer a free and
low cost Competitive Intelligence service via our web
site) offered by many of the search engines or portals.


But, be forewarned, if you don’t use some technology to
leverage yourself it can take a great deal of time to
assess these metrics, but well worth the effort. In the
end you will know what your online market presence is ­
providing you with actionable business intelligence
that enables you to understand how to maximize your
marketing dollars by knowing where you need more of an
online presence. And, most importantly as Sun Tzu once
said, "if you know your enemy and yourself, you will
win every battle." Sound advice from a master tactician
who had no idea his pearls of wisdom would be shaping
the digital age!

This text may freely be republished or distributed in unmodified form provided the following resource box is included intact either at the beginning or the end of the article and a complimentary copy or notice (link) is sent to the author at the address specified below:

Ralph Tegtmeier is the co-founder and principal of fantomaster.com GmbH (Belgium), < http://fantomaster.com/ >, a company specializing in webmasters software development, industrial-strength cloaking and search engine positioning services.

He has been a web marketer since 1994 and is editor-in-chief of fantomNews, a free newsletter focusing on search engine optimization, available at: < http://fantomaster.com/fantomnews-sub.html > You can contact him at mailto:fneditor@fantomaster.com
(c) copyright 2002 by fantomaster.com
All rights reserved.
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