60 essential free competitive intelligence resources from Justia : many via RSS

It’s not another ‘360’ service, Justia, the leading provider of search engine optimized web sites for law firms, has come up with the ‘Justia Free Sixty.’ It’s 60 essential free competitive intelligence resources. That’s not ‘essentially free,’ but free (costs nothing) essential resources.

Justia, on their Legal SEO Blog, tells law firms what they know, and a few things they may not:

To succeed in today’s business environment, you must know more about your own business than your competitors do. And, you must understand more about your clients’ businesses, than your clients do. ……

The first challenge is identifying sources of competitive intelligence. Thankfully, the amount of business intelligence available on the internet continues to grow. However, you must be able to effectively channel this flow of information to avoid drowning in an ocean of data.

Justia has compiled this list of 60 essential free competitive intelligence resources to help law firms harness the power of the internet. Here’s highlights of Justia’s first 11 but check out their post as they have a ton of screen shots that make things much easier to follow.

• My Yahoo. Heads this list because it offers a tremendous breadth of customized content with a clean interface. Furthermore, you can now place additional content modules into My Yahoo—beyond the default set provided—by taking advantage of RSS feeds.
• Google. Google your company, Google your competitors, or Google your clients. With over 8 billion web pages indexed, Google will likely provide you with some tasty morsel of information.
• Yahoo News. If you’re just skimming the headlines of Yahoo! News, you haven’t fully tapped into this essential resource. Yahoo News – RSS allows you to create custom news feeds based on search terms you’ve identified. You can then read these in an RSS reader or view them on My Yahoo!. Justia gives an example of tracking a Morrison Foerster news feed module on My Yahoo. This is an easy way to keep up with press coverage of your company, your clients or even your competitors.
• Google News. Google News doesn’t offer RSS feeds, but you can set-up a Google Alert, which is similar in concept to the e-mail-based Yahoo Alerts. Given a choice though, Justia much prefers updates by RSS feed instead of e-mail. Don’t like seeing too crowded an inbox.
• Company Background Reports

• Yahoo! Finance. For publicly-traded companies, Yahoo offers stock quotes, stock charts, news, company profiles, competitor data, industry data, analyst coverage information, ownership data and financial statements—all for free.
• Hoover’s Online. Hoover’s provides company fact sheets, news and financials on selected companies for free. Hoover’s also offers additional business data, such as officers and employees, D&B reports and corporate family trees on a subscription basis.
• CNNMoney Company Research. CNNMoney offers stock quotes, stock charts, earnings estimates, insider trading data, SEC filings, financials and news. It also provides news feeds from CNN/Money, Dow Jones, press releases and Fortune.
• MSN Money. Offers much of the same content as above in a less attractive interface.

• BNET – Company Updates. BNET features news updates for selected major companies.
• Yahoo – Company News. Generates an URL for publicly-traded companies in the RSS format. My Yahoo already allows you to subscribe to company news as a default feature. This alternative lets you see the same content using an RSS news reader.
• Moreover Technologies. Feeds Moreover features RSS news feeds by company.

Like the good folks at Justia say, 11 down, 49 more to go.