Research On The Acquirement Of Enterprise Competitive Intelligence From Microblogs

In the Internet age, social media such as microblogs has been widely used in people’s daily work and life. As a typical representative of social media, microblog has shown its important role in social interaction. Microblog has some special properties such as information diversity, real-time production, and open discussions. These properties attract a majority of users very quickly, because the unique feature of microblogs in information propagation and sharing offers people new experiences. Thus, both enterprises and individuals regard microblogging platforms as an appropriate place for information sharing.At present, many companies have opened their official microblog accounts. Through microblogging platforms, enterprises can post images, promote marketing activities, maintain customer relationships, and interact with fans. These activities are helpful to enhance brand values and influences. In fact, microblog is not only regarded as a marketing platform for enterprises, but also an important source of enterprise competitive intelligence. On this platform, information can be shared and transferred continuously with the establishment of social network, which implies that there will be more and more competitive intelligence in microblogs. Competitive intelligence is one kind of important assets of enterprises, affecting the survival and development of enterprises. Therefore, collecting competitive intelligence becomes more and more urgent and important for enterprises. As microblogs have been the new source of competitive intelligence extraction, enterprises need to make full use of competitive intelligence to improve their competitive power. Enterprises can collect microblog contents and fans’information from microblogging platforms so that they can know the strength of their competitors as well as their external environment. This can help enterprise to find out new market opportunities and gain competitive advantages.With the rapid development of emerging technologies, acquiring competitive intelligence for enterprises becomes more and more complex. How to quickly and efficiently carry out competitive intelligence mining has been a critical issue for enterprises to grasp business opportunities and respond to the changes of the surrounding environment. Although the rich information resources of microblogs bring opportunities for competitive intelligence collection and analysis, it also introduces some new challenges. In order to obtain accurate and reliable competitive intelligence from the huge amount of information, it is a key issue to extract information values, yielding the transformation from information to competitive intelligence. Only by transforming information to competitive intelligence, we can use information for decision-making work in enterprise and to effectively enhance the core competitiveness of enterprises.In this paper, based on a literature review, we first analyze the properties of microblogs and their competitive intelligence values. In addition, we summarize the existing methods of acquiring competitive intelligence from microblogs. Secondly, We study the strategies of competitive intelligence acquirement from two viewpoints, namely enterprise microblog based viewpoint and event microblog based viewpoint. Then, we propose a framework for competitive intelligence acquirement framework based on enterprise microblogs and event microblogs. Next, we perform an analysis on real enterprise microblogs and event microblogs and explain how to carry out intelligence work in the guidance of the framework. We also present a classification on the acquired competitive intelligence and define several types of competitive intelligence that can be extracted from microblogs. Our study shows that a large amount of competitive intelligence exists in microblogs and competitive intelligence can be extracted through appropriate methods. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of obtaining competitive intelligence from microblogs and propose some strategies for improving the effective and efficiency of competitive intelligence.The study in this paper can enrich the theory of enterprise competitive intelligence, provide some new ideas for competitive intelligence acquirement, and promote the future development of competitive intelligence researches. In addition, it has important and practical values for enterprises to better understand the merit of competitive intelligence and to effectively carry out work on competitive intelligence.