Interesting post

Read an interesting article about Social Media

15 Competitive Intelligence Tools for Recruiting

some snippets... Jason has listed... with thanks to him.

• Google Alerts: Keep tabs on what your competitors are doing, conveniently delivered via e-mail or RSS feeds. What about “A” talent your keeping tabs on? Press releases? Financial information? The opportunities with Google alerts are endless.

• SpyFu: Spy on your competitors online. You just need the site name, and SpyFu does the rest. What keywords and adwords are they targeting and buying? How are they performing? What positions are the most competitive? What are the results?

• SocialMention: Receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a developing news story, or a competitor. This can be a powerful tool, and includes exporting features as well.

• LinkedIn: Where do I start with the possibilities here. Track a companies new hires, promotions, people that have left, where they have gone, press releases, org charts, and on and on. Do you follow your competitors pages? If you aren’t taking advantage of everything LinkedIn has to offer, start with this one first for recruiting.

• BoardTracker: Want to know what people in forums are saying about you and your competitors? Find out with BoardTracker. It’s an innovative forum search engine that tracks messages and sends instant alerts from forums and forum threads of your choice. It searches over 37,000 forums representing more than 63 million threads. Another popular option is BoardReader.

• copernic.com: A sophisticated tracking tool that looks for new content on your competitors’ web pages. You receive an e-mail with a highlighted version so you know specifically what has changed. If their career site is updated or new positions are added, you’ll know what’s changed and when. This can be used on your desktop or iPhone / iPad.

• Twitter: Are you following your competitors and all their employees on twitter? How about the people that the competition is following, or those that engage the most with your competition? Are you leveraging twitter lists? What lists do they use or subscribe to? There are a lot of opportunities to leverage social media for competitive intelligence, though this one provides a lot of opportunities.

• Twitter Search: Twitter search is now the #2 search engine as of last week, according to several news sources. Are you tracking what you should be? Some obvious choices include competitor names, product names, and appropriate keywords. Use the advance search feature for even more options.

• Wikipedia: What’s out there about your competitors? Check out the business intelligence possibilities with one company’s search results on the Wikipedia site - for Walmart.

• Slideshare: Which of their employees are presenting? Where? What’s being published? Tap into this information with a couple of searches on the site, and you’ll quickly see what’s possible.

• The Free Library: A great source for articles and information on your competitors. You can browse by date, author, category and name.

• Google Finance: If your competitor is publicly traded, you can perform a search in Google Finance, where you can review income statements, latest news stories and blog posts about competitors and their business data.

• YouTube: Are you seeing video results for competitors? Have you subscribed to their YouTube channel?

• Collecta: What’s being talked about right now, and the trends?

• CI Radar: CI Radar delivers key intelligence about competitors, prospects, partners, customers, employees, industry developments and internal threats and vulnerabilities.