Building on the success of the Global Web it Congress from the past 7 years, DIGIT.EMEA is a distinct event paving the digital economy future and welcoming thousands of C-level global leaders, digital and tech entrepreneurs and founders 4500 top level attendees from 110 countries, conducted at Marriott Hotel Sisli Istanbul, Turkey on 18-19 November 2015 .builds the bridges for digital and tech between Europe, Middle East and Africa and creates real business opportunities. The impressions, articulation and insight into Congress will be presented via articles and interviews.
Interview #
Stand Visits and Interviews at DIGIT.EMEA- RIVALFOX
Competitive Intelligence Shift from traditional marketing to digital means that everything can be tracked ,monitored and data is readily available online. One of CI pioneer was at DIGIT.EMEA at Istanbul namely Rivalfox based in Berlin is a VC funded startup with a mission to “Make people do stuff better” and was founded in 2013 by an experienced team of entrepreneurs motivated to help digital marketers do a better job. The competitive intelligence from Rivalfox SaaS tracking tool/ solution aids user craft smarter, data-driven strategies based on competitive intelligence, and make Marketing Managers more efficient through monitoring relevant competitors and market channels.
Mr. Anas Salem is Co-Founder of Rivalfox GmbH and serves as its COO(Chief Operating Officer) and thanks him for the triumph of conducted interview
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu
http://www.cigdemyorgancioglu.org
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu Would you please kindly tell about yourself ?
Anas Salem: Hi, my name is Anas Salem and I am the COO of Rivalfox responsible for Sales and Finance operations in the team. Previously to Rivalfox I did my Diploma in Industrial Engineering and worked in different Sales roles. I also co-founded a company called BookitNow! before Rivalfox which was my first real experience with Startups.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu: How the name of the company associated with a smart animal “ Fox” ?
Anas Salem: While thinking about the name we wanted to have something which describes our idea the best, but still something which is not too boring. We were thinking about our customers as smart foxes who are using the information we are providing them and making a smart moves. Internally we are always using different fox names for our projects like soro or fennec :)
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : What is the challenge of Rivalfox in the Market ?
Anas Salem: I think for us the challenge is to create the product which people think is really useful and easy to use. Big Data is a complicated topic, that's why we must do a good job in translating the big data into easy and understandable and specially actionable pieces of information. On the other hand it is important to educate people about the importance of Content Marketing in general. I think in USA people realize and produce a lot of content and see the compounding effects of Content Marketing vs. in the rest of the world it takes longer.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu: Rivalfox SaaS solutions performing on SWOT analyze as well, So how would you appraise the Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats of Rivalfox?
Anas Salem: Strength - unique technology which makes marketers more data-driven and efficient.
Weakness - Making people understand the urgency of content marketing and being data-driven as the major factor in winning online.
Chance - High demand in the market and taking advantage that we are monitoring almost a 360 degree online marketing and provide insights by finding correlations.
Threats - Other solutions which offer social listening tools who are fighting for the same customers attention, although delivering completely other use case.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : Would you please kindly mention about the IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) and Copyrights procedure and practices pertaining the Software used in CI Tools ?
Anas Salem: Since we are using only publicly available information and are concentrating on online marketing we don't really have to deal with those practices.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : What is the reason of the success of Rivalfox and what is the differential advantage of Rivalfox against its rivals ?
Anas Salem: First of all, our goal is to become the european leader for digital competitive intelligence and content marketing intelligence. I think the technology we are currently working on will make the difference for marketers in their daily life and help them do the job better. Providing actionable tips with our technology will make a difference for us.
Our strong location in Berlin allows us to concentrate on Europe and european companies combined with a huge talent pool and cost efficiency. This factors allow us to also offer our customers a very competitive price.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : Though the [i]competitive intelligence [ii] is ethical and legal business practice, as opposed to industrial espionage and tracking of competitors based on publicly disclosed information, what are the regulations and legislative boundaries and code of competitive intelligence ethics you are encircled regarding the track of competitors?
Anas Salem: Rivalfox concentrates on tracking competitive intelligence information about online marketing activities. Competitive Intelligence changed in the last 15 years due to the explosion of the internet, web 2.0 and social networks. So since we concentrating on publicly available information we don't see any regulations or boundaries for us as a business. Our strength is to make sense of this data automatically due to the information overload and this is for us and other companies the real challenge in the new competitive intelligence.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : Relevant with the previous question as the information gathered are publicly known and accessed via search on Google , how Rivalfox filter the information that matters to your clients to prevent waste of time?
Anas Salem: We are currently monitoring about 15 different online marketing channels like all important Social Media channels, Blogs, Online Ads, Newsletter and more. All this information we are getting either by crawling publicly available information or using APIs. After the information is gathered, we are using our algorithms to determine all kind of KPIs for each channels. This helps us in further analysis of the data and picking up what we should show the users. Also users are very flexible on Rivalfox in terms of what they want to see and can easily filter information.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : What type of Competitive intelligence tools are used to identify risks and opportunities in the relevant rival markets ,by Rivalfox ?
Anas Salem: We are using our own software and putting a lot of human intelligence into making extra sense. Other then that we are using tools like mattermark to have a general information on companies, like funding rounds etc.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : What is the methodology used in gathering and analyzing up-to-the-minute information and how the clients make the necessary rival benchmarking with the datas and reports you provided?
Anas Salem: We are using the latest technologies at Rivalfox in the Front- and Backend. This makes our data really flexible and dynamic. All the information is gathered in real-time but the latest 1h after it is released online. Also we then keep track of that information to update the statistics and how it performs every hour. For each network we use an internal application and newest database technology to make the data appear as quickly as possible. This allow us to offer our clients benchmarking and reports, since the data is processed in real-time.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : What’s the difference between Competitive Intelligence and Strategic/Tactical Intelligence
Anas Salem: Those are very similar and require 4 steps like: gathering, processing and analysis and distribution of the information among the stakeholders. I would say that difference is that the one is concentrating a lot on competitor’s actions and the other one must consider all kind of information not only about competitors, but also market and others to make the best possible decision.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : What kind of tool and method you use not to access confidential information of the associated competitor ?
Anas Salem: As already mentioned we are using publicly available information and not trying to access confidential information. Our backend is made in a way that we are not even trying to do this kind of stuff because it is not legal.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : How do you monitor clients competitors’ digital marketing strategies and how the gathered data processed and decision making
Anas Salem: We are gathering and presenting information from 15 different marketing channels. This happens automatically. Marketing Managers use our dashboard to see what kind of topics are working among their target audience. Also our clients are using Rivalfox to benchmark themselves against the competition. This helps to identify gaps in some channels or understand where to double down to increase the results. We help marketers to become more data driven in their own marketing campaign/content creation.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : Does CI used in Governance as well ?
Anas Salem: I think CI can be applied to all kind of fields. Obviously in other fields, people are using different methods to analyze and gather data. Also other data sources are used in each field. We at Rivalfox are concentrating on online marketing activities, for this kind of field, I think at least right now Governance is not the most interesting use case.
H.Cigdem Yorgancioglu : Having reviewed Rivalfox Insight US Presidential Campaign on Social Media , would you please tell us about how CI and Rivalfox acts over here ?
Anas Salem: CI applies to all kind of companies and also individuals. That’s why we are monitoring all kind of companies of our clients, but also companies and individuals who might be interesting. With the help of Rivalfox we can analyze their online marketing performance. The presidential campaign is really interesting because Obama was using Social Media as one of the first to help him win the elections back in the day. In 2015 we see that all candidates are totally dedicated to Social Media and a lot of discussions and opinion building happens online. Since we have all the data we can use it for our own content marketing to deliver interesting insights.
"Competitive Intelligence Definition | Small Business Encyclopedia". Entrepreneur.com. 2014-06-09. Retrieved2014-06-24.
[i]CI /Competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors, and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers making strategic decisions for an organization. Competitive intelligence essentially means understanding and learning what's happening in the world outside your business so one can be as competitive as possible. It means learning as much as possible—as soon as possible—about one's industry in general, one's competitors, or even one's county's particular zoning rules. In short, it empowers you to anticipate and face challenges head on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence
Comments