If you have the ambitious combination of competitive nature and a proactive approach to business, you might be interested in a new Web 2.0 application called RivalMap.
RivalMap is an online application derived from the valuable feedback received by users and enterprise pilot customers of Competitious. Competitious is a similar application that’s “an easy, confidential way to discover and share competitive information collaboratively across your organization, and keep your company competitive”. It’s surely a great way to quickly list your competition and start finding news and traffic stats about them, but RivalMap takes the next step.
RivalMap is for multiple employees (the first 3 are free, $50/month for 5 users, $100/month for 10 users, and $200/month for 25 users). It gives the registered company a dashboard where you can manage all of the stats, news, and anything else you can find on your competitors. You can organize these into sections such as “flower book competitors” if you publish books on flowers, or you can dive into more specific categories such as “rose book competitors”.
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In your dashboard, you’re able to see the overview of your competitors, including recent activity, top competitors, and what’s hot. From here you can access all sections of your RivalMap such as the discussion tabs that feature notes, concerns, clippings, and comparisons.
In addition, on the dashboard you have activity timelines that show you all the activity in your workspace. You can also subscribe to this timeline via email and receive any new activity in your inbox, or by RSS feed. This is especially useful if you plan to have many employees showing how ambitious they too can be, and plan to leave comments, proactively adding to the collaboration.
Mapping your competitors
In the competitors section of RivalMap, you are able create an overview of all your competitors. This section is easily edited by anyone with access to the workspace so that everyone can collectively contribute. Users are also able to rate the “threat” of a company. This is based on user ratings, so the “threat level” is based on an averaged consensus and shows you which competitors should be watched closely.
In addition to this, there is a “concerns” section where users record and share updates about competitors that they feel pose a threat to your company. You are able to rate concerns so that they are viewed in priority, whether it is based on gossip or poses a significant threat. Users are able to comment on concerns, and concerns can be closed when the threat is no longer there, or alternatively re-opened later on.
Keeping and sharing clippings
One of the most interesting parts of RivalMap is the ability to create “clippings”, which are basically links to news articles or Web pages that you are bookmarking in relation to a certain competitor. RivalMap even gives you a downloadable “bookmarklet” tool so that you can quickly click and save any news, videos, or anything else you find. You can assign tags to these clippings to associate them with a competitor, product or customer segment.
Did you say customer segment?
RivalMap takes the technology one step further by helping you keep track of the customers of your competitors. You collect the name of the competitor at a minimum, but can also collect other details including how small or large of a customer they are.
According to TechCrunch, RivalMap plans to match Competitious’ pre-loaded company data set in the near future. This will feature robust traffic and blog data, as well as other information about all of your competitors on-hand when you add one, supposedly getting their stats from either Compete or Quantcast.
