Acquiring competitive intelligence from social media

Competitive intelligence is the art of defining, gathering and analyzing intelligence about competitor's products, promotions, sales etc. from external sources. The Web comes across as an important source for gathering competitive intelligence. News, blogs, as well as social media not only provide competitors information but also provide direct comparison of customer behaviors with respect to different verticals among competing organizations. This paper discusses methodologies to obtain competitive intelligence from different types of web resources including social media using a wide array of text mining techniques. It provides some results from case-studies to show how the gathered information can be integrated with structured data and used to explain business facts and thereby adopted for future decision making.