Web Business Marketing Blog

Powerful tools for market intelligence are emerging on the web. And the best part: they’re free of charge. The secret to a successful web intelligence initiative is in the selection of the tool suite.

1. Everything starts from rss

Initially, there was html which gave us websites. Then came embedded languages (such as php etc), which gave us web applications. And now we have rss, which allows web applications to talk to each other, without the need for any coordination.

For an introduction to rss, see rss in 3.5 minutes.

2. RSS readers

To read rss streams from other sites, you will need a reader. There are many, but we like Google Reader. It’s an unimaginative choice since it’s probably the mainstream reader, but it does the trick for us. Google Reader has the advantages that it integrates well into your iGoogle desktop to the web. But you could select any online or offline reader.

3. Build your custom information channel

With your reader set up, you can now subscribe to rss feeds of interest (and in the process unsubscribe to their newsletter equivalents).

Now that Google offers you rss subscription to searches, it gets really interesting. Use searches on Blogsearch or News to produce rss feeds on terms relevant to your industry, and subscribe to them in your reader.

Very soon, you’ll start to collect dozens of rss feeds, and organising them in folders becomes a must.

Finally, your collection of feeds becomes ‘your inbox to the internet’, a parallel collection point to e-mail. Make sure you clear it regularly (daily).

4. Benefits

This system gives you a method to keep daily up to speed on what’s happening in your sector.

But your collection of rss feeds produce a river of news which changes every day. Very soon, you’ll want something to archive or keep interesting items. That’s where social bookmarking comes in.

5. (Social) bookmarking

Bookmarking tools are designed to share weblinks to a community. There are over 150 bookmarking tools out there, with del.icio.us and digg some of the more famous ones. With 150 tools, the choice of a bookmarking tool is far from obvious - we opted for diigo for following reasons:

• It allows highlighting & commenting
• It is highly productive - making a bookmark takes seconds
• We can set up dedicated groups (e.g. the business marketing group on diigo)
• It’s free of advertising, and you can moderate groups to keep them spam-free

Therefore, in diigo, you can store your personal bookmarks, as well as share selected ones to the groups you participate in.

6. A solid foundation for knowledge management (KM)

This combination gives you a highly customizable and powerful information channel, previously only available to major corporations with deep pockets.

7. Great! But where’s the catch?

Well, see the first paragraph ‘everything starts from rss’. One of my colleagues, who is interested in ‘legionella’ found that only 1 out of his top 20 websites produces an rss feed. If you’re in this situation, re-visit this article in a few years.

8. What’s next?

The combination reader/bookmarking is only the foundation of KM. You will still need systems to process information, and turn it into actions to the organisation’s benefits.

But the above tools already allow you to pick up market signals, keep up to date, and feed your market intelligence / knowledge management system.