Here's a really simple way of using the power of Google to make your company more competitive.  It requires a little bit of work to get things going, but it is well worth the effort as it provides you with a quick and easy way to keep tabs on your competitors.

None of this is new, by the way.  It is under used, though. 

First you need to go to Google.  You know how to do this so I'm not going to show you.  Once you're there you need to either sign-in or, if you haven't done so already, create an account.

Once you have signed in (it only takes a few seconds to create an account even though you have to wait for a confirmation email) you can start personalising your page.  While there is a lot of stuff that has already been prepared, most of it is designed to keep you Googling or to get you to click on ads.  It is up to you if you use any of it or not, but for the purposes of this we're going to assume that you want to find out more about your competitors and that playing Pac-Man isn't that high on your list of things to do. 

So, once you're successfully signed in you get to personalise your page:

Now, I'm not going to get too involved in a technical discussion of what follows, but suffice it to say that if you follow the next few steps you will get to know the second your competitors so much as sneeze.

Open a new tab or a new window and go to the News search facility of your favourite search engine (we're going to use Google again because we're all about brand loyalty here!) and type in the name of your competitor inside quotation marks - e.g."my competitor" and click search.  This will bring back all of the news items that contain your competitor's name.

Now the thing that we are interested in here is not looking at the news stories themselves - that can wait for another minute or so.  What we want is the RSS feed.  This is the bit of technology that delivers new news stories and will keep you bang up to date with what is going on in the world.  So click the 'RSS' link and you will get to a really strange looking page.

Again, we're not interested in the contents of the page.  Copy the full url from the navigation bar of your browser - this is the important bit of information that we are going to need to get the news stories to your desktop.  Go back to the page/tab/window we were presonalising earlier and click the 'Add Stuff' link

Now, ignore all the little utilities that Google offers you and instead go to 'add by url' that they have hidden away in plain view next to the search buttons

Now then, in the space provided, paste the url that we copied from the News search  and click the 'add' button.  After a few seconds of 'loading' messages you will be able to go back to your newly personalised page and get all the latest news from your competitors!

Now that you have the steps to do this you can quickly gather information about you, your company, your customers, your competitors, your football team, your favourite blogs.  Oh, and you can also use the widget that lets you see what time it is.  It's called a clock, I think.

Any questions, let me know.