Newsletter: Feeding the CI monster with Nexcerpt.



	Friday, February 10, 2012	ISSUE 34

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Feeding the CI monster with Nexcerpt.

Krista Bradford, Founder and Principal, Bradford Executive Research, LLC

As a Competitive Intelligence (CI) professional and former investigative journalist, I’ve learned over the course of some 20 years that the effort one puts into conducting painstaking research and analysis doesn’t amount to a hill of beans unless you have something to show for it right now.

“Feeding the monster” is a phrase used by reporters to describe the process of generating enough stories to feed the insatiable daily news cycle and to keep their bosses satisfied. Television newscasts must air and newspapers must publish regardless of whether reporters and their respective stories are ready.

A similar beast can be found in the world of CI and any failure to feed him early and often places your CI practice and your client at risk. You must, therefore, track intelligence not only over time but in the moment, two distinct intelligence cycles revolving at different speeds. The reasons for issuing frequent, if not daily, intelligence bulletins are many:

Cover your bases – If you do not plug in to the daily intelligence cycle, will miss crucial shifts in the competitive landscape.
Seize the opportunity – most alerting or clipping services fail to take the final step to transform the news into actionable intelligence. Take that step for your clients and win their loyalty.
Add extra value – Offering your client frequent intelligence bulletins or newsletters is a value-add to your CI practice.
Promote your CI - The bulletins serve as a constant reminder of the strategic importance of CI (and that you’re earning your keep.)
Balance your perspective – As CI professionals become more immersed in lengthy projects, they can become far sighted, losing focus on competitive changes delivered by each new day. Yet these changes often redefine the scope of long term projects and therefore must be monitored.
Empower your client – Leaving your client empty-handed until a project’s completion leaves him powerless to defend CI as a line-item in the budget. Providing him with actionable daily intelligence ensures buy-in.

Fighting information overload

A number of my clients have complained that some of the most highly touted monitoring services serve up nutrition-less intelligence – fast food alerts that lack the most essential ingredient: information that is dead-on. Recently, one Fortune 500 client noted she wastes an inordinate amount of time sifting through these kinds of intelligence reports to extract a few useful nuggets.

Yet producing meaningful intelligence is not possible through technology alone. Even the most artfully crafted Boolean queries produce results that are off-the-mark. In the end, you still need a CI professional to scan search results to eliminate the unimportant information, to put what remains into context, and to recommend next steps. It is a service that is lacking in many of today’s change monitoring products, so it is a service you could offer for great effect.

True, the logistics of delivering daily or weekly intelligence bulletins are daunting. Few CI practices have the time to produce such highly individualized reports on so regular a basis and few have the wherewithal. The copy-pasting alone is enough to drive a person crazy. Yet there is a way to offer intelligence in the here-and-now by using a remarkably simple yet elegant web-based information retrieval and publishing service called Nexcerpt.

Consider the Source

The firm was founded by CEO Julie Stock who previously founded and later sold the change monitoring and intelligence gathering service InGenius Technologies. Her husband Gary, who serves as Nexcerpt’s “Chief Innovation Officer and Technical Compass” also has quite an impressive pedigree – a former Special Projects Cryptanalyst with the National Security Agency. His NSA work included daily use of “the most powerful, codeword-classified technology on the planet”. If that weren’t impressive enough, Gary is a web search guru, coining the term Googlewack and contributing to the book Google Hacks, which recently made it to the New York Times Paperback Bestsellers list.

In other words, the Nexcerpt product is informed by the deep intelligence expertise of two rather extraordinary individuals. And other important information experts are starting to take notice. Database doyenne and editor of the magazine Searcher, Barbara Quint, recently gave Nexcerpt a rare rave review. (The only other time she applauded a product was a dozen years ago.) Nexcerpt, she contends, knocks ‘em dead: “Well with the arrival of a new century, I guess it’s time for a salute to a second “killer product.”

In this case, killer is not defined as stunning new technologies, but rather taking pre-existing technologies and applying them in an entirely original way. Nexcerpt takes the tedium out of producing intelligence bulletins or newsletters by providing a search, editing, and publishing tool all in one. This isn’t software that you have to program to search for content by entering a huge list of website addresses into its settings. Nexcerpt scrapes information from 3,500 sources retrieving more than 35-thousand articles every day. In doing so, they cover a dozen categories of data:

Magazines - international, business, regional and cultural topics
Major Daily Newspapers -- those published in English worldwide
Regional Newspapers –Daily and weekly publications in North America
Local Newspapers – daily and weekly from throughout the US
News websites – such as CNN, CNET, MSNBC
Trade Journals – professional, political, cultural and technical publications
Wire services – also online works
Online Portals – the websites for TV and radio stations
News Groups - Indices and Summaries
Web Logs (Blogs) - Personal and Professional
Intranet servers - configured to permit Nexcerpt agent access.
Subscription databases - client provides login information

Intelligence bulletins in as little as 15 minutes

Using Nexcerpt, it takes me approximately fifteen minutes to half an hour to edit and deliver intelligence bulletins to my clients. The process is user friendly. After you sign up for the service, you log onto the Nexcerpt website and construct up to ten queries to run every day. Once your daily queries are run, an email arrives in your inbox with a link to a rough draft of your bulletin or newsletter. You click on the link to review excerpts of what Nexcerpt has found, checking boxes by the excerpts you want to keep.

Nexcerpt provides room at the beginning and end of every report, and after every article to add commentary and CI analysis. Another click of a button and the report is emailed to the mailing list of your choice (you can set up many – one for each project, for your CI practice, for your clients). Of course, you don’t have to publish what Nexcerpt finds. Some Nexcerpt clients simply use the service to monitor topics or targets of interest, preferring not to share their results with a broader audience.

I found Nexcerpt to be easy to use and affordable. Moreover, because all of its technology is web-based, no software needs to be installed. Implementation is immediate.

Nexcerpt’s most glaring weakness has been that it only searched text documents and not files in other intelligence-rich formats such as the Adobe Acrobat and PowerPoint. However, they’ve just added the ability to search Adobe files and they plan on building Nexcerpt’s capability to search within other formats as well, including PowerPoint. Additionally, they are continually adding to their source list and tweaking their text analytics capabilities.

I wish their interface allowed users to test the results of queries beforehand, so in the beginning it can take a number of days to fine tune your searches results. (One workaround is testing keyword combinations in Google.)

Compared to other data services, Nexcerpt is relatively inexpensive. Subscriptions cost $200 a month. For tight budgets, often the cost can be passed on to the clients by charging them a subscription fee for your personalized alerts.

Nexcerpt weaknesses:

Only searches text documents and Adobe Acrobat files, missing content-rich formats such as PowerPoint.
Takes time to fine-tune queries

Nexcerpt strengths:

Performs scheduled searches on up to 10 queries on 3500 quality information sources.
Logs in and queries databases to which you subscribe or searches your own intranet
Provides rough draft with article excerpts linked to full text documents.
Allows you to choose the excerpts that are relevant.
Provides room for your commentary and analysis on each news item.
Allows you to co-brand the report with your corporate logo.
Generates reports that can be uploaded to a website or sent via email
Manages distribution to different groups.
Web-based and requires no installation
Relatively inexpensive at $200 a month

Interestingly, the application of Nexcerpt extends beyond the bounds of CI. The queries can be used to identify new business leads or to generate content of interest for newsletters to current or prospective clients. But whatever the application, Nexcerpt saves their customers countless hours and resources as it helps them build and retain crucial business.

Background

Krista Bradford is Founder and Principal of Bradford Executive Research, LLC (BER) and a leading proponent of the use of competitive intelligence for human capital development and retention. While BER provides a broad range of competitive intelligence services, it specializes in providing intelligence to Human Resources practices. Ms. Bradford is a widely recognized investigative expert, skills she honed over the course of more than two decades as a three-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, having held positions with WNBC and WWOR TV in metropolitan New York as well as with television stations in Boston, Denver, Los Angeles and St. Louis. She is a former national news correspondent for "The Reporters" on Fox Television and senior correspondent for the nationally syndicated news TV magazine "Now It Can Be Told."

Ms. Bradford has written articles for numerous national publications. Memberships include: Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP), The Executive Search Roundtable, Investigative Reporters and Editors Association (IRE) and the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP). She studied at Harvard and Columbia University. Krista may be contacted at krista@bradfordresearch.com .

Copyright Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

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