| Ricci Street
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They called you for a job interview, a very good job. How can you best help yourself before the interview? You might try to read everything about that company available on the Web. Yes, you'll read every word on the company web site. But what about an online public forum where customers trash the company's products? What about a consultant's three-year-old white paper using the company as an example of horrendous management mistakes? What about the online resumes of people who recently worked for the company, specifically the guy you're replacing who's still looking. Why did he leave?
Then you have this nagging thought. What are you missing? What's "out there" on the Internet that you're really going to be sorry you didn't discover before your interview?
Your boss passes along his personal broker's hot investment tip: buy XYZ Corp. now. Your boss doesn't know much about XYZ, but he asks you to "look into them", and he'll get back with you tomorrow, maybe over lunch, to discuss XYZ's immediate future.
Lunch with the boss? Now, that's unprecedented. If XYZ really is a hot tip, maybe you'll buy some of its stock yourself.
Overnight, you need to become an expert in XYZ and the future of its industry, its competition, its supply chain, and its market. Later that evening, it's still early and you've exhausted Yahoo. You read everything there and everything at XYZ.com. Now what do you do?
Let's see how much is really out there.
Q: How good is the information you find on the
internet? How can you tell?
A: As good as the information you find off the internet. You can tell the
same way you did before.
There's more information available quickly online, but that's about all that has changed.
You can trust the corporate web site as much as you trusted a corporate brochure. You can trust unhappy customers blasting the company on a discussion forum as much as you can trust them doing the same at a dinner party.
Major difference: interactivity
Online, you will find lots of names and email addresses. Send a short, polite, professional email asking questions to help you assess validity.
Minor differences:
Honest
mistakes can get corrected on the internet. They're frozen in print.
A printed textbook
would have fewer typos than Ricci Street has.
Other than that, you should bring the same sharp critical intelligence to the internet that you bring to every other area of your life. Rule One: always mistrust authority.
Over the past eight years, the corporate web site has blossomed from an online calling card into a diverse collection of individual personalities. As a whole, the millions of corporate web sites make available to the public an array of resources never available before.
Its
quantity would be unimaginably tedious and expensive to amass as print
documents.
Its
quality reveals more about the corporation's values and personality than
corporations ever revealed before except to a select and controlled and small
group of stakeholders.
To thoroughly research a company, read every word on its corporate web site. If it's an international conglomerate with more material on the web than any human could read in several lifetimes, then read broadly and cursorily and pick one area to probe as deeply as time allows.
Look at the company's past web sites. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine will let you examine many if not all the previous versions of the corporate web site, often dozens of versions dating back five and six years. The job postings alone can tell an interesting story.
Web sites that sell things, aka retail or transaction sites, are often skimpy on the corporate information, which may be in an "about us" section. The corporate information may also be on a completely different site or on a parent company's site.
To learn about Nabisco, you could start at http://www.nabiscoworld.com/, which as best I can tell, has no link to either http://www.nabisco.com nor its parent http://www.kraft.com/. However, it does have a link to http://www.candystand.com/, which urges you to "ENJOY THE Nabisco WEB SITES!" Both NabiscoWorld and CandyStand have links to the Nabisco Online Privacy Policy, which is available at http://www.kraftapps.com, the corporate legal site.
While you're there, keep checking the urls. With the Kraft web sites, you'll see addresses at marketlocator.com even though the are still designed like Kraft sites. Marketlocator.com doesn't have its own web site. It's owned by Affina, the customer relationship management company to which Kraft has outsourced the task.
Would you outsource your customer relations?
Polson Enterprises' How to Learn About an Industry or a Specific Company
The New York Public Library's Searching for Company Information
Rutger's University Libraries' Company Research and Market Research
Debbie Flanagan's Researching Companies Online is a nice looking, well organized approach by .
This business research tutorial presents a step-by-step
process for finding free company and industry information on the World Wide Web.
Accurate and timely information is essential for any business to remain
competitive. With the Internet, you can gather a tremendous amount of business
intelligence information on prospects, competitors, vendors, suppliers,
customers, or other companies in just a few hours.
Harvard Business School's Baker Library Industry Guides
On the outside, the freedom of speech coded into the Internet and inherent in its distributed architecture is enabling freedom of speech for people all over the world. To many of these people, freedom of speech is foreign, and they reject it. Their governments don't like it, either.
On the inside, the freedom of speech coded into the Internet and inherent in its distributed architecture is enabling people to get access to much more information about a company that the company doesn't control. Much more information about a government, too.
Much of what you will most easily find away from the corporate web is information that comes from the corporate web site. For instance, basic financial performance indicators may well be available on the Web from:
the
annual report section on the corporate web
the filing report
summaries on the federal SEC web
an article on an
industry publication's web
the Hall of Shame on
a watchdog group's web
What about information not controlled by the company?
How to find something when you aren't sure what to look for, what to call it, or where to look for it.
The phrase "industry publication" above sounds specific, but companies usually affect several industries and serve several markets. For example, you can learn a lot about the office-building construction industry from reading publications focused on the office-furniture industry.
What to do with contradictory information.
Which has more credibility, the product description on the corporate web site or the product description by a frustrated consumer on a help site?
As you do your research, let what you find take its own shape. To get you started, two common general analytical models can be adapted to the specific company and industry.
Internal strengths and weaknesses, external opportunities and threats
Mind Tools' SWOT
The driving and restraining forces, the pressures for and against change
Mind Tools' Force Field Analysis
Tip | If you're looking for information on XYZ Company, search for "v. XYZ". It will produce information about lawsuits filed against the company.
Articles about the company are good. Can you find a site or discussion where the company's customers are talking to each other about the company? Lawsuits involving unhappy customers or partners? Company reps speaking at trade shows or conferences? Employees in service to the community? Reviews of the company's products and services? Financial analysts' predictions of the company's performance? Some business school prof who did a case study of the company and linked it to his marketing class' web site?
print magazines'
sites
newsletters
discussion forums
(search Topica and
Google Groups)
blogs
associations for promotion, public service, and lobbying
Port 80 Lighthouse's Reference Desk
Competitors is another slippery word when you're doing research. However you define them, you can repeat the search described above for each of them.
At the very least, you want a sense of how crowded the market is and the relative sizes of the competing organizations.
How high are the barriers to new competition?
You can often go back several links up the supply chain. In the automotive industry, for example, these are called tiers. The industry site, Covisint, treats GM and Ford as OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and a company like Delphi as their tier-one supplier. However, from Delphi's point of view, the companies that supply the engine parts are their tier-one suppliers. The supply chain is only as strong as its weakest (slowest, most expensive, poorest quality) link.
On the other end, the company may have several distribution channels. If Walmart were to disappear, many companies would be in big trouble. When Walmart says jump, many manufacturers compete to jump higher.
Who's the customer? Who's the consumer? Who's the wallet?
For example, the textbook publishing company's customer is the professor who "adopts" the book, which is a euphemism for requiring his class to buy it. The students are the consumers. The employer who might reimburse the student is the wallet.
demographics
market research
opportunities and threats
What does the company make or do?
What's the latest academic and
corporate research into these things and processes?
What academic departments
study them?
What professional societies and standards bodies promote and
regulate them?
What discoveries or developments would pose opportunities and
threats?
Map out the current landscape of this company's public context by defining the prominent issues.
Major Think Tanks & Policy Groups
Who has a stake in the outcomes of the issues? Who is concerned about the issues?
Use the common PEST formula: political (law), economic (markets), sociocultural (norms), and technological (code).
local, state, and federal laws and regulations
local, state, and federal legislators and regulatory agencies
demographics
public personalities: authors, talking heads, and other experts
trade conferences and
other indicators of the labor market
commercial organizations
professional organizations
industry associations
social organizations
tools and technologies
web sites
Any broad issue is made up of sub-issues and underlying issues and larger issues.
Help yourself untangle this complex situation by clearly stating the prominent issues in debatable terms.
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