When we talk about business intelligence, we often hear the phrase "weak signals".
Why is this so important? Mainly for two reasons:
1-You guessed it, weak signals mean information that hasn't yet been picked up by a wide audience, including your competitors. Some weak signals can unearth the beginnings of upcoming market trends or disruptive innovations. Some weak signals may take several months to gain strength, but in some cases it will only take a few days.
For example, information on a media outlet such as Les Affaires newspaper has a low strategic value because everyone in Quebec has access to it. On the other hand, a weak signal coming from the Twitter feed of a European scientific laboratory related to your applications can represent high-value strategic information.
Many of our products are available on the Internet.
"Many of our customers monitor their supply chain, and the weak signal has a significant strategic value in identifying possible disruptions and potential price hikes."
2- Capturing weak signals can help you position yourself BEFORE your competitors, especially if you have a positioning strategy on social media. Indeed, as the space available to differentiate yourself from your competitors on social media is becoming increasingly narrow, it pays big dividends to increase your level of engagement (shares, comments, clicks) to be aware of the slightest trends in order to bounce back and position your distinctive aspects.
"The weak signal is therefore fragmentary information, rapidly obsolete and largely anticipatory, which would enable the company that identifies it to predict future major transformations in its economic environment." Igor Ansoff , Managing Strategic Surprise by Response to Weak Signal (1975)
How to make it a strong point of your intelligence?
If the success of a watch is based on giving the right information, to the right person, at the right time to make the right decision, how do you make a weak signal stand out?
First of all, your monitoring should be entrusted to a seasoned in-house watcher, initiated in the sector or paired with an analyst (such as the PHAR model).
Then, it's important to be able to contextualize this information by cross-referencing sources, guided interviews with experts or specialized curation. This phase is generally very rich in information and discussion!
This phase is very rich in information and discussion!
What about artificial intelligence?
In the case of artificial intelligence, platforms can perform concordant cross-referencing to suggest sources or articles according to some learning of your desires or aversions. However, the tool has the quality of its shortcomings: it can become so powerful that it can place you in a "black box" and offer you only what you're used to looking for. So human intelligence is still relevant!
Why are Google Alerts not really weak signals?
Since this type of alert requires information that is properly referenced, already shared many times over and presented according to your user profile, this type of signal only qualifies for a slim fraction of the weak signals in the available batch, or represent the least weak signals in the batch.
The other problem comes from the fact that semantics is used to produce alerts. In some less traditional industries, the semantics employed surrounding an innovation or trend may not be in line with what you're looking for. In more creative or highly technological industries, it can become very difficult to obtain quality alerts corresponding to a high strategic value.
Finally, unless you write or read several languages, these alerts won't be linked effectively by language correspondences. As a result, you'll only have access to articles in your chosen language, and you'll miss out on all the rest of the content (Mandarin, German, etc.).
Finally, unless you write or read several languages, these alerts won't be effectively linked by language matches.