Practically every web service and site worth its salt is
offering its information through a newsfeed. With Google Reader or the
newsreader of your choice, here are some ways to gather business intelligence on industries, clients, and competitors.
Subscribe to feeds from company web sites. You can get press release and investor information from the likes of Pfizer.
Apple has a number of feeds
available. Still some old economy companies like Ford don’t have any feeds,
but consumer products giant Johnson & Johnson is on the bandwagon.
Create feeds from Google News searches. Keyword search and create a newsfeed from the results. Search for the term “consumer recall” and Google News creates
a feed that will update every time a news story matches the query. It works just like the “Google Alerts” feature, but without adding to all the junk in your e-mail inbox.
Even “old media” has jumped on the newsfeed bandwagon. The “Old Gray Lady” herself, the New York Times, has many RSS feeds available. In the left coast, the Los
Angeles Times has scores of feeds. Local media can provide intel on local markets. (See Washingtonpost.com
and the Sarasota
Herald-Tribune).
What others around the Net are bookmarking. Social bookmarking site Del.icio.us can provide newsfeeds based on tags of sites its users bookmark. For instance, you can grab the feeds for “biotechnolgy” and see what people want to save to read for later, share with their friends or keep for reference.
The Job Market: Great intel can be found in whose hiring. Craigslist has feeds
for Job postings by title and lets you focus on regional markets. Job listings in the classifieds of newspapers are also available as newsfeeds. Nationally, Monster.com
has RSS feeds for job titles and categories, and some regions.
Blogs about clients and industries: Practically every blog comes with a newsfeed these days. And some of the best news comes out of industry blogs like Techcrunch,
that leads the way in reporting on Silicon Valley. Google’s Blog Search lets you create feeds based on keyword searches just like
Google News. Technorati lets you set up feeds for tags and keyword searches.
Have any more? Let us know!