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Competitious Keeps Tabs on Your Competition

I recently started playing around with Competitious, and I think it’s a pretty cool idea.  They’re in beta still, so I expect it will become a bit more robust.  It looks like they raised some angel money about 18 months ago, not sure of any VC infusion or anything since.  But it’s a great tool for the smaller businesses that want to have an organized interface to track their competition.  It’d be a great tool to hand off to an intern and have them update and monitor every day, and then have the key stakeholders (Online Marketing Director, VP of Marketing, etc.) login and check out; or it can send them email updates for certain happenings.

Here’s how it works. First you create an account and then create a project.  You add your URL and name as “My Company” and then you add your competitors’ URLs and names as your competitors.  You can see the project I set up using my old friends at Tactics.com as My Company, and then adding some of their competitors.

Once you have them all setup, you can then build a feature matrix.  You enter categories and features, and then check off features that the sites have or don’t have.  For example, a category might be, Community & Social Media and a feature may be Blog.  You can view the very simple feature matrix I set up.

You also can add “Clippings” you find on yourself and competitors.  This is a good way to track everyones PR and press.  It would be cool if there were some type of Google Alert integration, or something similar, that you could set up to suggest new clippings.  For now, the onus is on you to find them and add them, but they have a bookmarklet you can use to quickly add one, via a popup or redirection to the Competitious project.  Here’s a shot of me adding a great article about Tactics to the Clippings, via the bookmarklet popup window in Firefox:

They also have a traffic comparison section, that pulls in the Alexa graph for the sites in your project.  This section is a bit janky, mostly because of Alexa.  But they claim to have a more robust setup for the full product release.

Overall, lots of room for improvement with Competitious, but they are still in beta, and I really like the idea.  It has some great potential, if you have someone to spend 30 minutes or so every day pushing data into the project, then it really can streamline the monitoring part of keeping up with the Joneses.

Tags: competitor monitoring