Fuld: One of the great things about the Web is that it's a window on the world. But often the best sources of information on a competitor are the most local - the community newspaper in the town where a company is headquartered or has a big plant. If [IBM CEO] Lou Gerstner moves his elbow, the papers in Westchester County report on it. The Web can get you to these local sources; even the smallest papers have Web sites these days. But you have to work to find them. NewsLink http://www.newslink.org connects you to more than 3,600 newspapers and magazines from around the world - even college newspapers - and it's searchable by state. NewsWorks http://www.newsworks.com searches through and links to all the newspapers in nine of the country's biggest publishing chains.
Remember that CEO who rode the bus? A local paper did an in-depth piece on life at one of his company's factories, complete with great data on how many people worked there, what the average salary was - remarkable stuff. We put that information together with other data and developed a pretty reliable estimate of manufacturing costs at this plant. Hometown papers are one of the few places where you can get that kind of information. Always look locally.
Scott: Be sure to look beyond traditional business sources too. I'm a big believer in preferring soft information to hard information - and in reading between the lines. Two of my favorite local sources are the wedding-announcements page and the lifestyle section. Remember Working Girl? Melanie Griffith is working on a deal and reads that the daughter of one of the big players is getting married - so she shows up at the wedding reception and makes her pitch. I've never done that. But you can make interesting connections if you combine business news with "social" news.
Friedman: We keep talking about "the Web" - a term that implies "free." But I also use fee-based information services. One of my favorites is First Call http://www.firstcall.com. It offers broker-oriented material on companies: analyst reports, earnings estimates. It also lets you subscribe to industry-based services. Not surprisingly, we subscribe to ones that track wireless communications.
I also use something called Profound http://www.profound.com . Profound is not a search engine - and it's not free - but it's a good place to begin searches. It gives you tables of contents for research documents and lets you decide which parts you want to download - and pay for. That's important. One of the dangers of pay-as-you-go information services is that you can ring up serious bills pretty quickly. But competitive intelligence is like any other part of business: Usually, you get what you pay for.
Edwards: There are a couple of reasons why you might want to use proprietary services rather than the Web. For one thing, information you pay for is usually more reliable. There's also a security issue. When you visit a Web site looking for information, the people who run the site often know that you've been there. You might not want them to know that.
I still use the Web all the time. And more and more of the proprietary services are making their search capabilities available over the Web. Dialog Web is a good example. If you go there http://www.dialogweb.com , you can do free searches that tell you how much information you're going to find in the 450 databases available through the site. You need a password to download the information, of course. Another service I use is called STN Easy, from the Science and Technical Information Network (http://stneasy.cas.org). It has science information and patents from 200 databases on chemistry, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and other subjects. Every industry has its version of this database - and it's usually worth paying to use.
Gina Imperato gimperato@fastcompany.com is an associate editor at Fast Company. She couldn't keep a secret if her life depended on it.
Meet Our Intelligence Operatives
Want to get smarter about gathering intelligence on your business rivals? Then spend some time at Fast Company's school for snoops. Our four panelists - including big-name consultants and in-the-trenches researchers - have no secrets. In fact, they're downright eager to share their lessons and techniques.
Leonard Fuld lfuld@fuld.com, 44, is the undisputed dean of competitive intelligence. His firm, Fuld & Company, founded in 1979 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has done research and training for hundreds of blue-chip companies. Fuld is the author of three books and the creator of many research techniques that are now standard operating procedure in his field.
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