How to Spy on Your Competition In the ear l ier issues, we told you about the importance of online reputat ion management and about measurable signals of your brand popular ity. We are logical ly continuing the topic with onl ine benchmarking.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese mil itary general, strategist and phi losopher, wrote in his “The Art of War” treatise about the importance of knowing compet itors before competing. The marketing revelat ions made by Al Ries and Jack Trout in “Marketing Warfare” (1986) also underl ine the same idea – marketing strategy and tact ics are based on the same principles that mil i tary strategy and tact ics are based on. You should learn and analyze your competitors’ marketing strategies before you start developing your own strategy. In this way you wi l l avoid mistakes your compet itors made and employ their best pract ices. And to be a step or two ahead of your compet i t ion, gett ing information on what your competitors are doing at every moment must become your daily business routine. The good news is that to track your compet itors’ online ef forts, you do not need to plant a mole or steal their secret documentat ion. You just need a few onl ine tools.

• Xinu Returns tel ls you how wel l your competitors ’ sites are doing in popular search engines and social bookmarking sites. I t shows a great var iety of important sites’ stat ist ics. Along with the SEO information such as Meta tags of the index page, its rankings in Google, Alexa, Technorati, Compete, a site’s number of backward l inks and indexed pages, Xinu wi l l g ive you information on how many t imes the page’s URL was mentioned on social bookmarking sites and wi l l let you see those mentions. Armed with this data, you can work out your own strategy to outperform your competitors: get more backl inks (with Web CEO Link Popularity Checker you can see what pages l ink to your competitors’ and then contact them with the help of the Partner Finder tool), and add your interest ing stories or helpful art ic les to the social media sites.

• Board Tracker is an innovat ive forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and eff icient ly while ensur ing you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it was posted. Search for your competitors names and be aware of what their c l ients say. And, of course, do not forget to monitor your keywords and your product names to react on t ime.

• Google Alerts notif ies you when your competitors are ment ioned in the news or when you have a new compet itor in your area. Google wi l l let you set up to 1,000 alerts for each account you create with them, so you can monitor al l your keywords and competitors’ names.

• PostRank monitors and col lects social engagement events correlated with onl ine content in real-t ime across the Web. PostRank gathers where and when stories generate comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other forms of interact ion f rom a host of social hubs. With PostRank you wi l l d iscover the best blogs, news, and art icles by your topic, so you wi l l see whether your compet itors create stories that engage an audience.

• Social Ment ion is a social media search and analysis platform that

aggregates user generated content gathered across the universe into a single stream of information. I t al lows you to easi ly track and measure what people are saying about your competitors and you, your company, a new product in your market, or any topic across the Web's social media landscape in real-t ime. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media propert ies direct ly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.

• SpyFu. Frankly speaking this tool has nothing to do with social media, but s ince we’re talk ing about spying, we can’t help mentioning it . SpyFu al lows you to browse compet itors' dai ly AdWords PPC budget, average posit ion of ads, est imated value of organic traf f ic, paid traf f ic compared with organic traff ic est imates, top ten paid keywords with keyword ad history, total paid keywords, total organic keywords, PPC competitors (with a l ink to overlapping keywords), organic competitors (based on semantic relat ionships). You wi l l get more information as a subscriber, but f ree reports also help you get the general idea.

With all of the above ment ioned, remember that success in marketing and promotion of your product can be achieved only if you keep the balance between smart copying of the best competitors’ pract ices and introducing your own innovat ive marketing ideas.