James Andrus

Founder

News Patterns

www.newspatterns.com

James Andrus is the Technical Founder, President of News Patterns.*

News Patterns is a special search engine enhancement for news and social media.
By knowing who you are, News Patterns delivers the news you need to know to better
compete.

News Patterns does this by discovering competitive patterns in the news.

Competition drives the most important news in our lives.

These patterns tell us what is most relevant to know and read, in spite of too much news
to read, or not knowing the right questions to ask.

News Pattern patterning technology and animated visualizations are enabling a revolution in news awareness.

James is an engineering graduate from the University of Cincinnati; MBA from the Kellogg
School of Northwestern University.

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 information garnered from competitive intelligence can seem daunting and countless hours may be wasted trawling through unnecessary data. Also, reliability of information may be questionable and doubts exist about the potential for exposure of sensitive or confidential information. Knowing that your customers may be stalking you can be advantageous because it will make you more aware of what information you publicize. Even though email blasts and online content provide the best ROI for marketing purposes, social media monitoring is the hottest trend and is most effective when performed by experts. A 2011 study reported on businessinsider.com concluded, “Digital marketers who use paid Social Media monitoring solutions are twice as likely to be "extremely satisfied" as those who use a free solution.” To turn this trend into an advantage for your company, consider the following. The online world is soaking in competitive intelligence. Mine social and traditional media online for a competitive advantage. Understand the art of online misinformation. Develop a coherent process for validating competitive intelligence online. Lastly, your own secrets are probably online as well... button up your organization!