How to Stay Ahead of the Competition

As everyone knows, the key to making informed business decisions is information.  The more information you have about your industry and competition the better decisions you can make.

Our good friends at Google have had a service they call Google Alerts for some time now.  For those of you not familiar with Google Alerts, they are e-mail updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.  For instance, you can set up an alert for any topic you wish to monitor and Google will e-mail you when your topic is found.

But what makes this even more exciting is that Google now allows you to monitor discussions in their Google Groups for your selected topic.  It monitors the top 50 most recent Google Groups search results that relate to keywords you're interested in. Any new articles posted that match your criteria will be e-mailed to you, just like Google News alerts.

Now you can monitor current discussions about your industry and competition and stay ahead of the curve.  Give it a try!