If you think spying is only for snoops, read on: Spying, otherwise known as intelligence or monitoring, has become an integral part of day-to-day operations for savvy businesses wanting to gain a competitive advantage. Competitive intelligence (CI), defined by Wikipedia.org as: “The action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization,” has been around in numerous forms for decades, but has gained popularity in recent years as a result of advances in social media. However, despite numerous tools being available, an article in Social Media Today noted, “A 2009 survey by Hoovers found that 75 percent of respondents didn’t use social media for competitive intelligence.” Learning to use these tools is easy, but daily monitoring is needed to be effective. Bill Rice listed five crucial elements for effective social media monitoring on bettercloser.com: Identify promising social media networks; Create social media profiles; Aggregate social media; Track important people (influencers); Continually tune your competitive intelligence. For novices, analyzing the...