Two months ago, when I wrote on using LinkedIn to gain information on your competitors - titled "Open Source Intelligence: LinkedIn" - I expected no response. It's been an interesting and useful exercise of mine that I thought a few would get a kick out of... nothing more. Publicly, yes, that's exactly what has happened... but off the record, there's been quite a bit more going on. If you've contacted me so far, thanks. What I hope to share here are a few further tips on gathering useful information.

To make this clear, you're not going to find detailed information like system documentation or internal corporate policies. If you do manage to get that information, you may be in violation of laws or working with people who are violating them, so just forget about it. It's not worth the effort or the potential trouble.

Instead, find are the patterns between and among people.

How is it useful knowing that firm X has six Java developers and three bizdev guys? That in itself isn't. The useful information comes from the other key thing about LinkedIn... the recommendations. It all comes down to this:

The term "Open Source Intelligence" comes from the concept of using public (open) sources to gather information instead of clandestine sources. While it's common for governments and large companies to do this, small companies usually don't. It can be a time-consuming process and therefore not a good fit for a small company... unless you find a small set of highly accurate and relatively complete sources.

In the last 12 months, I've been working with a number of customers - and within CaseySoftware itself - on strategy, product planning, and related aspects. Each of these things requires knowing the state of the market, what's going on in a specific segment, and even knowing details about certain companies. Some of this information is publicly available via product roadmaps, press releases, and even the occassional website but all of this information is highly filtered and scrubbed by PR-types, lawyers, etc.