June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
19h 8m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 16. What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors
This book is about getting a complete picture of every website that affects your business. You will know the most about websites and communities you run, and you can learn a significant amount by moderating and joining communities. You can also gain important insights into your competitors through many of the techniques we’ve seen so far.
You can use community search approaches to eavesdrop on your competitors and see what people think of them.
You can use synthetic testing to compare your competitors’ performance and uptime to your own.
You can use search and ranking tools to understand how well your competitors are viewed by the rest of the Web.
Some usability tools may even let you analyze how test users interact with competitors’ websites, helping you to improve your own.
Before you embark on any competitive analysis, you need to consider whether you care if your competitors know what you’re up to. If you perform competitive research from your own domain, their analytics will show your visits. What’s more, they may have specific terms of service on their websites that prohibit things like synthetic testing or crawling by others.
Let’s look at how you can keep an eye on your competitors.
Note
If you haven’t already done so, review Chapter 14. All of the approaches we describe there apply equally well to competitors.
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.