Any of these scenarios sound familiar?

Endless Cut and Paste – a Researcher’s Nightmare:  With flickering incandescent lights above and a bottomless cup of coffee perched on the mug-warmer beside you, you stare at the Web page in your browser and feverishly cut and paste the characters you see on the page into a crisp, clean Excel file so that you can maintain a pretty chart for your team lead.   You go back to this site on a regular basis (several times a day, once a day, once a week…) to ensure that your chart is up to date, accurately portraying the price trends, demand shift, or stock fluctuations that you were so painstakingly keeping your eye on.

5 Browsers Open and Yet There is Nothing to Show for It:  You sit behind your monitor scouring site after site looking for any material news about the competition.  You have 5 browsers open and a table in word that you cut and paste the release date, headline, summary, and link of the news article into when your Google search results finally lead you to some relevant new placement about a competitor’s product, executive team, or material announcement.  As you glance over the top of the monitor you notice that framed diploma you grumble “What am I doing?  I didn’t go to college for this!” 

Ok, so maybe these scenarios are slight exaggerations, but rest assured that these are real scenarios in corporations across the globe.  With technologies – like intelligent software agents -- that enable us to automate monitoring and gathering tasks, there’s no reason for the frustrations of doing things manually.

Here are a few examples how deploying intelligent software agents can evolve your research and intelligence practices. 

Blog Monitoring for Brand Awareness and Sentiment – Everybody is online these days and they’re broadcasting frantically.  Whether they use Twitter or LinkedIn or a focused professional forum, they’re making comments about the products, issues, and businesses that they like.  And without a doubt, they’re probably being even more vocal about those that they are not happy with.  Rather than spending your time monitoring countless blogs and forums, why not setup an Agent to monitor all of these forums on your behalf and simply report back to you when postings are made concerning your company, competitors, brands, or other keywords?

Monitor Competitor Activity – You always need to keep your finger on the pulse of the competition.  Perhaps you work for a pharmaceutical company and need to keep abreast of each clinical trial, and respective stage, that the competition has underway.  And not only the clinical trial stage detail but you also want any news, updates, or alerts that the competition is posting about each trial.  You can setup Agents to monitor clinicaltrials.gov on your behalf.  Agents can report on, count, and present results in an easy to digest manner, delivering to email, databases, portals, or other options. 

Competitor Pricing / Pricing Fluctuations – The landscape is competitive out there so keeping up-to-the-minute with pricing fluctuations – whether it be pricing index detail or online pricing of specific products/lines – intelligent Agents can take on the grunt work.   Agents can be setup to deliver full pricing detail or simply pricing changes from any source.     
Companies deploying Intelligent Software Agents as a part of their research and intelligence efforts are reporting astounding ROI.  Perhaps you can benefit, too!  Your virtual workforce awaits…

Bruce Molloy is the chief executive officer of Connotate,a Web consultancy. Visit www.connotate.com for more information or call us at 732-296-8844.