If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.
The trick is in the filtering, to be sure: you don’t want to plow through irrelevant searches or receive too few alerts about the things that you want to track. “The quality of content I receive is unbeatable. I now spend less time searching for stories about prospects, competitors and my industry and more time engaging my audience,” says Kelly Morgan, director of marketing at HealthRx and an early user of the GageIn service.
GageIn scans millions of local and regional news sources to aggregate hyper-targeted local news about both large and small companies alike. It tries to pull information about companies, people and actionable events such as personnel changes to a single place and doing so in real-time, too.
As mentioned, you can import contacts from Salesforce and LinkedIn and you can share your updates with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and Chatter and Yammer are in the works too.
You can use GageIn for free for following up to five companies and three search alert terms. Prices start at $5 per user per month for up to 25 companies and five alerts, and there are higher tiers including unlimited enterprise accounts that offer Active Directory single sign-ons and mangement tools. As a promotional offer, anyone who signs up for GageIn by November 2 is eligible for a free six-month unlimited access subscription.
