Competitive intelligence is the art of staying one step ahead of the competition by gathering as much information as you can about their operations. You have to know what they are up to, so I am going to show you how to check out your competitors' products and marketing schemes without them even knowing you are there. In other words, this article is about how to spy on the competition without getting caught.

Assuming that you have less than five direct competitors, you should always buy their product to determine their sales process (and service), and get on their mailing list to see future promotions. The relatively small price you invest will pay for itself many times over in the knowledge you gain by finding out what they are doing and how they are doing it.

Some of your competitors may process orders manually and could recognize your name as their competition. So use your spouse's name, a fictitious name, an employee's name or an alternative company name (if you have another company) that will allow the mail to get to you without revealing who you are. Also, make sure you use an alternative email address and phone number.

I do this with all of my competitors and find out exactly what they are doing, who they are dealing with and how they are doing it ... All by their email and snail mail correspondence.

Also, by purchasing their products you will also be able to experience exactly what a regular customer would go through and you can then judge their product, service and operations against yours. This gives an advantage to all of your clients because you will know the pros and cons of your competition and can more effectively sell your product or service.

Important Tip: You may even want to have one of your employees or friends call your competitor for you. They could pose as a satisfied customer wanting to see what products or services the company is working on for the future.

Where Do You Start?

An absolute must is to go to http://www.cyberalert.com/.

CyberAlert is an automated web monitoring, market intelligence and online knowledge management system designed for multiple users in corporations and other large organizations. The daily CyberAlert service provides companies with a timely way to identify new postings about the company and its brands just about anywhere on the Internet. The service also enables marketing, public relations, business development, investor relations and competitive intelligence departments to better manage and track the identified online information.

With CyberAlert providing an early warning system, subscribers can respond in a more timely way to avoid negative campaigns against a company or product -- before a complaint, piece of misinformation or problem can spread through cyberspace and cause serious damage to a company's reputation.

Here are some of the infamous "urban legends" spread online:

• That Heinz Ketchup contains cow's blood;
• That you can get a free Nokia phone by forwarding email;
• That Corona beer contains urine;
• And that presidential candidate George W. Bush refused to sell his house to African-Americans.

All not true -- but these rumors and hoaxes were seen by tens of thousands of people on the Internet and believed by many. The damage was already done, and that doesn't include the potential need to spend money and energy in damage control.

Basic Service

The CyberAlert 3.0 web clipping and media monitoring service uses proprietary software to automatically monitor, filter and clip more than 2,000 web publications daily, including news syndication services, business wires, PR newswires, daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and periodicals, trade journals, TV networks as well as other online news sources.

The CyberAlert media monitoring service also monitors and clips more than 60,000 Usenet newsgroups daily. By deploying multiple search engines, it provides the most comprehensive monitoring of commercial, government, academic and personal websites, searching indexes of more than 2.2 million sites each day. CyberAlert also offers a customized service that can monitor any set of client-specific websites on a daily basis.

Email Service

CyberAlert is a daily service. You get email notifications every morning containing abstracts of the citations that have been found. You are also given a username and password that allows you to log into the system where you have an account. This is where you can sort through all your citations, see the full text version and either save or trash your results.

Search Strings

If it were a wine related subject you were interested in then they would set up a search for that particular subject. They can use operators such as "and," "or" or "not" to narrow down any search that is too large. The CyberAlert search technology can accommodate complex Boolean-type searches.

Subscription Fees

CyberAlert charges one flat monthly fee of $395 per search term and this is with no "per clip" charges. For the first month of service, there is a one-time initial set-up fee of $125 per search. For more, refer to http://www.cyberalert.com/.

How To Spy On Your Competitors -- Legally