In the race to set up shop along the information superhighway, some businesses are overlooking the obvious: information. As companies queue up to advertise on the Internet's World Wide Web or commercial online services, "you don't find very many of them doing the competitive intelligence thing," says Wally Bock, publisher ofCyberpower-Alert, an electronic newsletter about doing business on line. They're goingonline to buy and sell--but not to monitor their competition, track their industry, or find out what their customers think.

Trouble is, the so-called information highway is more of an information forest. With 16,000 discussion groups on the Internet alone, it's sometimes hard to find the trees. Chat groups often wind up looking like focus groups with no focus. "People get off topic a lot," says Mark Walsh, president of GEnie Services in Rockville, Md., a consumer online service owned by General Electric.

Searching devices such the Stanford Information Filtering Tool (SIFT) make the process easier. You give them a word--the name of your product, say, and SIFT combs through thousands of newsgroups for mention of that product. Mike J. Terpin uses it sporadically for his client, Chinon-America, a leading maker of CD ROM drives. "If I find 75 references over a two-day period, I know it's time to look and see what they're saying about Chinon's products," says Terpin, president of the Terpin Group, a public relations and strategic communications firm in Marina del Rey, Calif.

Terpin's online savvy came in handy for another client, America Online, when AOL launched the Greenhouse Project. The object was to find people with interesting sites on the Net and lure them over to AOL. To find these rising electronic stars, AOL ran promotions in The New Yorker and other traditional media and posted messages to various Internet newsgroups. The search turned up The Motley Fool, four guys in their 20s, whose tongue-in-cheek financial advice has become an AOL standout.

O ne cyber-shopkeeper who seems perfectly at home with online schmoozing is labor lawyer Mark Thierman of Palo Alto, Calif., whose Web page draws some 200 hits a day. He subscribes to LaborNet, a collection of AFL-CIO discussion groups online, "to find out what the enemy is thinking. Since I represent management," he explains, "I'm very interested in hearing what labor has in mind."

At Allen-Bradley Automation Group in Highland Heights, Ohio, a Rockwell Automation Business, employees monitor and post issues to CompuServe forums for automation and process control. The company also participates in Automation News Network, a business-to-business Web site with over 150,000 buyers and sellers and 1000 daily logons.

Although ANN customers can forward their comments electronically, most of these tend to be non-committal--something on the order of "Glad to see you on the Net. Keep up the good work," says John Lewis, director of promotional programs for the Allen-Bradley Group.

For a clearer glimpse into its electronic future, Allen-Bradley recently surveyed customers via regular mail and by posting the questionnaire to the Net. One of the surprising results that "just jumped off the page," says Lewis, "was that almost 25 percent said they had transacted some business on line." Another surprise was that 50 percent claimed access to the Net--though Lewis was expecting 20 or 30.

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