Watching me surf through Monster.com the other day, Jim Shelley, our new business development director here, raised an amusing point: “You probably have the only job in the world where you can spend the morning at Monster.com and CareerBuilder, go to eBay for a while, and wrap up at Match.com and Yahoo! Personals - and all the time, claim to be working!”

He’s right. Sort of.

I spend a ton of time visiting online automotive, employment, merchandise/auction, personals and real estate sites - primarily dot-coms like Realtor.com and Match.com, but newspaper and broadcast sites, too. It’s important to me to constantly research them - see what new features they’re touting; look at their latest promotions; count the listings in a client’s market to see how the client’s online product compares with the competition and watch their prices.

Unfortunately, too many newspapers don’t spend the time online that they should.

Check it out

Does your classified department have a regular routine for checking Monster.com, HotJobs.com and your local online employment competitors? Most newspapers regularly check print competitors, but many don’t spend nearly as much time carefully studying their online competitors. In some ways, nowadays, that’s backward.

Establish a specific, scheduled program for reviewing your competition. If you’re large enough to have one or more employment advertising reps, they should check Monster and HotJobs daily, along with CareerBuilder.com (if it’s a competitor), a regional help wanted site if there’s one in your area and any competing papers’ sites.

In the U.K., you need to check GoJobSite.co.uk and TotalJobs.com, among others; in Germany, the leading sites include JobsInTown.de and JobWare.de.

What should you be looking for?

*New advertisers. If your competitors have a new advertiser in your market, treat it as a valuable lead. After all, it’s a local employer who chose to advertise with a competitor. Can you convince him or her to advertise with you, too? Was he on your prospect list and were you calling on him? If so, why did you miss out on the business? If he wasn’t on your prospect list, why not?

*New postings from your current advertisers. If they’re posting jobs online with your competitor, are all of those postings also in your newspaper? On your Web employment section?

*Volume: Do they have more local job listings than you do? Are those listings placed locally or nationally? Are they “scraping” (compiling) job postings from businesses in your market? (If so, those companies are prospects for your job site, too, as long as you also offer job scraping.) Do they have “featured employer” pages from companies that haven’t bought pages from you?

*           Features: Does the site offer tools and products that yours doesn’t? Does it aggregate resumes better than yours does? Does it provide salary comparison tools, cost-of-living information, links to real estate agents or local school or community information that your site does not? If so, what are you waiting for?

*Leads: Are there jobs in communities nearby that should be advertised on your employment Web site and in your newspaper, as well?

*Editorial content: Is your local editorial content about jobs, local employers and the regional job market far better than the competition’s?

*Trend lines: The ideal trend line (from your perspective, of course), is that you’re growing while your competitors are shrinking. But unless you’re measuring regularly and consistently, you’ll never be able to identify the trends.

The same rules, of course, apply to automotive, real estate and merchandise/auction sites. Check them all regularly.

You should know who’s spending money on your competitors, what services those competitors are offering and how best you can match them, or preferably, offer services that are better than your competitors’.

Two companies we know of, Ranger Data Technologies of Royal Oak, Mich., and Wanted Technologies of Quebec City, Canada, provide electronic tools for tracking competitors and converting them into leads. In addition, Classified Intelligence, our consulting company, offers competitive analysis and “mystery shopping” services for newspapers.

Regardless of whether you take advantage of any of these services and products, it’s still important that you regularly study the competition.

Two advantages

Newspapers have at least two major inherent advantages over national and international classified Web sites. First, newspapers have the ability to develop a strong, valued relationship with their local advertisers, in the process ensuring they’re providing the best possible services to those advertisers at the most efficient cost.

Second, they have the ability to provide the best local content and information (including the content of the ads themselves).

So don’t be afraid to spend time surfing such sites as AutoTrader.com, Monster.com, Realtor.com and others. You’ll see a thousand reasons why you should strengthen your efforts to stay ahead of the competition.

Peter M. Zollman is founding principal of Classified Intelligence LLC and the Advanced Interactive Media Group LLC. He can be reached at 407.788.2780 or via e-mail at pzollman@aimgroup.com.

Editor’s note: Classified Intelligence recently released its “Employment Annual,” a 100-page-plus report about employment advertising in all its forms - among them print, online and broadcast. It takes a look at companies that are successful, along with a look at the Big Three job sites and their direction. Information about the report is available at www.classifiedintelligence.com.