3 Secrets of Stealth Market Research

Those willing to tread unconventional paths in search of information can steal a march on the competition. Here are some techniques.

by Christopher M. Knight [December 13, 1999]

Note: NSI has pulled the following services since this article was published. The method is no longer available to marketeers.

The WHOIS database—managed primarily by Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI)—is where all of the domain names for .com/.net/.org are stored. Today, we're going to unveil some of the cool ways you can leverage this tool to your marketing advantage.

The Big WHOIS Secret
Would you like to be able to find a list of the domain names your local competitor is hosting? Here's a nifty procedure that until now was coveted as a secret weapon by the few that knew how to use the advanced WHOIS tool. It's as simple as 1, 2, 3 . . . 4.

1. Do a WHOIS lookup on your competitor's primary domain name.
2. Do a WHOIS lookup on their primary DNS server, located at the bottom of the domain record.
3. Find the hostname of the DNS server. It will usually end in -HST
4. Do a WHOIS lookup on the hostname of the primary DNS server with the word server before it. Example: WHOIS server [insert hostname]-HST

NSI's WHOIS lookup tool will spill out the first 50 records found. Granted it's not the entire database, but it's 50 hot leads for your sales team to follow up on today.

IP Block Walk-Ups
Walking your competitor's C blocks is also a fun strategy to gather competitive intelligence. As you probably know, a C block contains 255 IP addresses. Your goal is to run the above WHOIS Secret to find a cross section of your competitor's domains, and then do an NSLOOKUPs on the domain names to find the IP equivalents. NSLOOKUP is a tool that will give you the IP address of a domain name or vice versa.

Example: Prodigy.com has an IP address of 207.115.62.74, and it's reasonable to assume that they have full control of the 207.115.62 IP address block.

Once you have compiled a list of every C block of 255 IP addresses that your competitor controls, you can go get an IP walk-up scanning utility, such as Ipswitch, Inc.'s WS_Ping ProPack. This will allow you to scan an IP block range. If your competitor has reverse DNS on and they are doing Websites the old way, where each Website gets its own IP address, you just got a whole party pack of information to get your Web-design/hosting sales team busy this month.

After you have every Website domain name of your competitor that you can collect, have your ISPs marketing admin do individual WHOIS lookups, to get name, address, phone and contact information into a contact list database or spreadsheet.

The Front-Door Secret
any of your competitors have online directories of their Web-design or hosting clients. Surf it, do WHOIS lookups on each domain name you find there, and create a marketing database of your competitor's clients.

At any given time, you can be pretty sure that not all Web-design or hosting clients will be 100 percent satisfied with their ISP. That is when they will remember that other ISP (you) who has been sending them snail mail letters and postcard invitations to do business with you. [Read Chris Knight's Drip Marketing for ways to unobtrusively keep your message in front of "prospects" such as the customers of competitors.]

A Thought On Ethics, Integrity & Etiquette
Is this ethical? Yes it is. All is fair in love and competition. If you think your competitors are not doing this against you, think again.

I would offer two bits of advice from using the above stealth research strategies:

1. Don't make your initial contact with your competitors' clients by email. Always make contact via telephone or snail mail first. Only after you have made an initial contact is it okay to email them.
2. Don't tell everyone you know about this article, and don't brag that you know about this technology, because it'll be used against you.

To Your ISPs Success!

Christopher ("Sparky") Knight
Founder & Managing Editor of the ISP-Lists Discussion Community

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