Tools For Thought - Intelegia

Thanks to the various sharing platforms and inexpensive cameras, posting videos has become fairly easy to some individuals. Just by connecting a wire and a few clicks of a mouse, videos can appear instantly similar to text on blogs.

At times, video can capture things that you would not have imagine placed on the internet. Here is an example in the context of competitive intelligence research.

I happen to stumbled onto a site dealing with entrepreneurship and web 2.0 based projects. As I was browsing the video archives of interviews, I was able to access a clip of interview with an individual that has started yet another social networking website.

Two questions that I was shocked to see the person answer on video were:

a) How are you funding your venture?
b) What is your business model?

Seeing that the ideas behind some social networking sites are somewhat easy to duplicate, the replies to the questions are valuable to competitors, especially when it is coming from the horse’s mouth on VIDEO!!!. If competitors are informed about how the venture is being financed and how the site is planning to generate revenues, then changes to their respective strategic plans can be adapted to outperform other sites.

My point behind tell you this story is that internet intelligence research should not be limited to the general web. Contributors to the web 2.0 is making it easier to find content within seconds thanks to various tools and data in the form of text is no longer the only source for strategic significant information.