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Here I share my professional expertise with my audience. As a marketing, sales and competitive intelligence executive I frequently publish and dicsuss new findings, solutions and activities in these areas.

Thursday
Aug122010

SCIP Name Change

Strategic Dimension

As a board member of SCIP I would like to announce SCIP's name change and provide some background information as well.

After thorough debate and member involvement with wide spread debate and fruitful exchange we decided to change the name of the society to reflect on our growth path that has produced significant results since the economic down turn and SCIP's strategic alliance with the Frost & Sullivan Institute as a measure to strengthen the Competitive Intelligence profession long term.

Please find the press release on the name change and the official SCIP statement here.

Text copy of the press release:

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- On July 8th the SCIP (www.scip.org ) Board of Directors voted to officially change the 25-year-old non-profit organization's name from "Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals" to "Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals."  This modification reflects the developing evolution of the competitive intelligence (CI) profession to support executive decision-making and firmly acknowledges the relationship between competitive intelligence and strategy.

"This name change executes on the next phase of our strategic growth plan by emphasizing the importance of the CI profession to an organization's direction and success," said SCIP Immediate Past Chair, Martha Gleason of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida.  SCIP Vice-Chair Scott Leeb of Prudential Retirement commented, "This name change acknowledges and formalizes what CI professionals have known for some time -- strategy and competitive intelligence are inextricably linked."

"SCIP has evolved to become the global association for a broad range of professionals who directly support and influence strategy. To reflect this change in SCIP's name is only logical. Strategy anticipates and prepares our future and SCIP is a proud anchor for anyone who lends their skills and passion to it," said SCIP Board Member Jens Thieme of Lonza Group Ltd Switzerland.

The change to "Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals" will assist SCIP in a number of ways:

  • Support an added focus on strategic decisions, one of SCIP's principal goals.
  • Include individuals who both work with and are customers of intelligence practitioners.
  • Increase the connection of senior decision makers with their intelligence effort.
  • Emphasize both the tactical and strategic orientation of our members.
  • Create a unique value proposition by combining strategic and competitive intelligence.
  • Maintain the SCIP acronym to preserve our 25 years of brand development

SCIP membership consists of private sector intelligence practitioners who provide skilled analysis on the competitive environment which enhances business decision-making and organizational performance.  With the pace of technological development and the growth of global trade, today's business environment changes more quickly than ever before, so executives require additional informed analysis to make strategic business decisions.

Please contact me for further questions or revert directly to scip.org or SCIP's CEO at: kgarrison@scip.org

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DateThursday, August 12, 2010 at 7:34PM AuthorJens Thieme in ,
Thursday
Jul012010

Don Heathfield - Russian Spy?

Intelligence consultant arrested

It does not happen every day that you recognize a face you know well in the papers under the heading "CEO 'spy' with S'pore link". Someone I met on multiple occasions provided me just that experience this week. Exciting? Hardly!

Having worked in the global Competitive Intelligence arena as a leading Intelligence Officer and as a Director of the Board of the largest Competitive Intelligence association the networks are colorful and interesting. Sometimes a bit too colorful it turns out.

As reported in the global media, Don Heathfield (as we know today that might not have been his name) was arrested this week among 9 other people on charges of spying for the Russian secret service. Having dealt with Donald over the years at conferences and business meetings as well as casual chats and even personal lunches it strikes me how much one can be tricked into false identities or circumstances.

Not wanting to comment on Don's potential involvement before he might even be convicted, the shock sits deep as I was actually under the impression to have dealt with a proper company and a reliable, solid and trustworthy CEO of FutureMap (Don's business).

I still remember last fall when I asked him during lunch we had in Basel, Switzerland where his weird accent came from he responded candidly that his mother came from Eastern Europe. Something seemed fishy there as Don knew about my upbringing in former communist East Germany because it seemed odd that he did not mention a specific country in response let alone Russia. I clearly identified his accent on the spot but did not want to elaborate further for politeness.

Sometimes I wonder though what might have happened had I pushed him further and nailed the question on this Russian shade more closely... or whether I should avoid opening his LinkedIn page (that also shows my lose connection with him)...

LinkedIn.com profile of Donald Howard Heathfield, clear name: Andrey Bezrukov or Андрей Безруков.

UPDATE 2010/07/09

Apparently Don and his wife confirmed the claims and have been swapped with agents and spies of interest to the US in the largest spy swap after the cold war. According to a Boston Globe article Don's Russian clear name is: Andrey Bezrukov  or Андрей Безруков.

"Bezrukov and Vavilova have two sons, a 20-year-old student at George Washington University and a 16-year-old student of the International School of Boston. Both left the United States in the past few days and are in Russia awaiting the return of their parents..."

"The agreement requires Bezrukov and Vavilova to forfeit their $799,000 Cambridge townhouse, all the belongings and cash within it, and their US bank accounts and other assets.

They are also barred from profiting from any book or movie that tells their story, a common provision in such deals in American courts. In addition, they agreed to renounce any right to claim Social Security benefits they might have earned while living in the country.
They also agreed to never to return to the United States and to abandon any claim to US citizenship..."
 

UPDATE 2010/08/02

German Bild.de newspaper publishes more pictures and background story...

Donald Howard Heathfield, clear name: Andrey Bezrukov or Андрей Безруков.

"Donald Howard Heathfield", clear name: Andrey Bezrukov or Андрей Безруков.

 

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DateThursday, July 1, 2010 at 4:37PM AuthorJens Thieme in ,
Saturday
Jun262010

Blog Title Swap for Blogger Pages

Change Blogger.com title position

How to improve your blogger.com blog in search engine ranking and traffic generation based on the position that the individual page titles have within the title string that you see in the browser title line.

Recently I noticed a dramatic drop in traffic with all my blogger.com blogs that I run in blogger.com (umfinanzieren.com,undebt.org, viertesreich.info, kopfgeburt.info, intret.com, collectedspam.com). When opening any of the individual pages (posts, click at the post itself and the dedicated page opens for this individual entrance in your blog) I noticed that they all showed the blog title in front of the title string and the blog post titles were hidden behind the title.

As many of my blogs carry quite some keywords to attract targeted visitors in general the position of the individual blog post page titles (the name, titles of the various posts when they are posted) they would hardly be recognized by search engines and thus ranked very low in the search engine rankings.

Or in other words: the blog pages, based on their title did not differ much from any other in the blog and thus could not unfold the meaning of the pages content and attract the targeted traffic.

There is a simple trick to find out how search engines read and display back to users what they recognize in terms of your blog's page titles. Go to google.com and type: site:yourdomain.com (whereas yourdomain.com should actually be your real domain).

The result page will list all pages as recognized by Google and here you might notice, as I did, that all individual blog pages are "labeled" with the title of the blog in general and the individual page titles might be positioned at the end of that title.

See, search engines consider the beginning words of a page title most important and rank the pages accordingly in their index. So, if all your pages carry the same content in the first 5 or 6 words of the title string, they all rank equal and there is no targeting of content possible. This diminished the value of your blog pages and content and dilutes the entire value of the blog and its concept.

How to change

Fortunately there is a fix that you can apply which does not require specialist knowledge.

 

  • Open your blogger.com account.
  • Click at Dashboard.
  • Find the blog you are working with.
  • Click Design.
  • Click Edit HTML.

 

In the window that shows the template HTML code position your mouse cursor and copy the content of the template with the keyboard keys CTRL+C. Open your favored plain text editor and paste the content there by using the keyboard keys CTRL+V and save the file on your desktop so you can easily find this backup copy later and delete when done (this is just for backup, in case you mess up the HTML code so you can easily replace the messed-up code with the original backup content).

Next you need to find the string that handles the position of your title string. It might look like this:

 

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

 

...or simply like this:

 

<title><data:blog.title/></title>

 

Replace it with this string now by using above-mentioned copy/paste keyboard commands:

 

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> |<data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> </b:if>

 

Now save the HTML template by using the orange Save button in your blogger screen and you are done. For testing, open your blog and click at an individual blog post page title and you should see the targeted, individual title now in your browser top tab or frame.

 

It worked for me, let me know if it did for you or if you tweaked it any other way.

 

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DateSaturday, June 26, 2010 at 2:55AM AuthorJens Thieme in
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