The only constructive way is through search.twitter.com. A lot of mentions there are from potential customers looking to make a decision. Having that information often lets us insert ourselves into the discussion.
All the other stuff is just a total time waste and way to make yourself unhappy. I'm trying to train myself to just think about my own business and customers.
I remember when I was at Odeo, a podcasting startup, we'd hear about all of these startup competitors and I'd get sort of worried. When the company switched to Twitter, Odeo was left un-updated for an entire year (it now has new and active owners). At the end of that year, Time voted Odeo a top-50 website and I can't even remember the names of the competitors.
My take away is that competition is either much less important than your own execution or so massively disruptive that you don't need to track them. In Odeo's case, itunes was that big of a disruption and was the major reason we were experimenting with side projects (like Twitter).
I used to use google alerts initially. But now I have switched to subscribing to the feeds from news.google.com and blogsearch.google.com for custom search queries, along with subscribing to competitors' blogs and forums. This should cover media coverage, new features and customer reactions.
I do not monitor for downtimes specifically, as any major downtime will anyway come up in the news/blogs.
But if you are very much interested you may sign up for website monitoring tools like site24x7.com (has a free version) or pingdom.com (no free version) and monitor their downtime too. Some of these tools check for web content changes too. You can use it to track changes made to specific pages of your competitors' website.
I hope you track references to your product/service too, as you need to respond quickly to customer reactions, both positive (with at least a thanks) and negative (apologize and fix the problem).
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 25.8 ms ] threadAll the other stuff is just a total time waste and way to make yourself unhappy. I'm trying to train myself to just think about my own business and customers.
I remember when I was at Odeo, a podcasting startup, we'd hear about all of these startup competitors and I'd get sort of worried. When the company switched to Twitter, Odeo was left un-updated for an entire year (it now has new and active owners). At the end of that year, Time voted Odeo a top-50 website and I can't even remember the names of the competitors.
My take away is that competition is either much less important than your own execution or so massively disruptive that you don't need to track them. In Odeo's case, itunes was that big of a disruption and was the major reason we were experimenting with side projects (like Twitter).
I do not monitor for downtimes specifically, as any major downtime will anyway come up in the news/blogs.
But if you are very much interested you may sign up for website monitoring tools like site24x7.com (has a free version) or pingdom.com (no free version) and monitor their downtime too. Some of these tools check for web content changes too. You can use it to track changes made to specific pages of your competitors' website.
I hope you track references to your product/service too, as you need to respond quickly to customer reactions, both positive (with at least a thanks) and negative (apologize and fix the problem).
worth mentioning and used daily: compete,
tools: page rank checker, back link analyzer, paid link analyzer, supplemental index ratio analyzer