One of the lesser-known and most powerful features of Contify that helps users to contextualize competitive intelligence

Like most market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) platforms, Contify aggregates information from thousands of online sources. Our customers have consistently told us (for over a decade) that Contify's information is the cleanest among all providers. And that it is the only M&CI provider that structures information according to their business context with fully customized taxonomies.

Hundreds of enterprises, such as AT&T, MetLife, Medtronic, and EY hence use Contify. In addition, global information products such as LexisNexis, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and more have relied on Contify news feeds and news APIs since 2009.

Besides several configuration options and features in the Contify platform to clean, structure, and contextualize the information, one distinctive feature usually surprises the new users of Contify. The true potential of this feature becomes evident only after using it for a while.

The feature: Edit updates directly to add context and insights

This powerful feature is the ability to directly edit the title and body text of the update to add insights and make it contextually relevant to the internal stakeholders. For example, a blog post from a competitor could be awash with marketing jargon, and sales speak. But it could also have a weak signal indicating a new use case, positioning change, and a new customer segment.

The stakeholders receive updates with the title and intro written for a general audience. Therefore, they must put extra effort into reading the analyst's comments (if available) to understand the significance of the update and put it in the proper context. Unfortunately, most stakeholders are overloaded with so much information that even with the comments, they sometimes miss the signals in the noise.

Most platforms allow users to add comments to the updates but not edit the updates.

Why other platforms don't allow users to edit the updates?

There are more layers of complexity in managing unstructured content than what meets the eye of unsuspecting users of market and competitive intelligence platforms. These platforms solve the non-trivial challenges of crawling, scraping, tagging, and removing duplicates. Finally, after all the processing, they make the relevant updates available to their users.

To enable editing of updates by customers, a platform has to maintain separate copies of updates for all its customers. This complicates the processing of unstructured content manifold. Most platforms avoid this complexity by keeping a single copy of the updates. Therefore, they can't allow users to edit updates because it will change them for all other users.

However, platforms do offer a workaround to this problem. They ask users to add their organization context using the "comments" feature of the platform. Comments are unique for each customer.

Why does Contify allow editing of updates?

Contify's philosophy is that market, and competitive intelligence is all about the context. An update could be an invaluable insight for an organization, whereas it could be junk for its direct competitors. Even within an organization, an update could be actionable intelligence for one function and useless for another.

Therefore, Contify was designed from the ground up to be configurable so that it can adapt to different use cases, requirements, and business contexts. It offers custom taxonomy, custom sourcing, branded newsletter templates, flexible dashboards, and the option to white-labeled the platform.

This option to edit an update is one of those powerful features that make Contify users transform the aggregated information into intelligence by adding their organization's context.