Market Monitoring with Picasi: Set It Up in Four Steps

Market monitoring often happens on the side, without any tool: a few bookmarks, a Google Alert on the name of the biggest competitor, the industry association's newsletter in someone's inbox. That works until someone is on vacation or a press release gets lost between two meetings.

A market analysis examines the market in depth once, over a bounded period. Market monitoring, by contrast, runs continuously. That is exactly why it needs a setup that works without daily searching. Picasi is a tool for this kind of continuous market monitoring, and here is what the setup looks like.

What market monitoring covers and how it differs from market analysis is explained in Market Monitoring: Definition vs. Market Analysis↗ on source-first-intelligence.com, our website on the Source-First approach.

Step 1: Decide whose publications you follow

You start with a list of sources, not a list of keywords. A source is a specific sender: a competitor, a customer, an association, an opinion leader in your industry. A short list is enough to begin with. A good test is to ask whose press release you would read right away if it came out today. The list grows as you notice who is missing.

Source tags keep the list in order, for example “competitor”, “association” or “trade media”. That sounds like admin work, but it pays off when you analyze: later you can look at just the competitors or just the associations.

Step 2: Bring each source's channels together

A source rarely speaks in only one place. The CEO posts on LinkedIn, the company sends a newsletter, product videos run on YouTube, the blog has an RSS feed. Picasi tracks these channels for every source and brings them together in the Unified Inbox: one chronological stream, filterable by source, channel and tag.

AI tags incoming updates by topic automatically. That is a suggestion, not a verdict. Your own topic tags take precedence.

Step 3: Analyze instead of just reading

With several sources and several channels each, more comes in than anyone reads in full. That is what Reports are for, in five analysis types: strategic analysis, summary, annotated list, conversation starters and LinkedIn posts. They are built from the sources you monitor, not from a language model's general knowledge.

If you are looking for patterns rather than individual posts, open the Matrix. It shows who in your market communicates when and for what purpose, filterable by channel, tag and time period. And with AI Context you store your product, market and positioning, so the analyses fit your company instead of staying generic.

Step 4: Bring the results to where your team works

Monitoring that only one person knows about is a risk. Scheduled Reports go out daily, weekly or monthly by email to any number of recipients, including colleagues in sales or management who never want to log in to yet another tool.

Anyone who works in Picasi directly gets read, write or admin rights through user roles. The number of users is unlimited. And if your team already works with Claude or ChatGPT, the MCP integration brings the data right there. It is included in all plans.

What Picasi does not do

Picasi shows what the sources on your list publish. A sender you have not added stays invisible. If you want to know where a keyword appears anywhere on the web, keyword monitoring is the better fit.

This limit follows from the approach: Picasi focuses on the senders you have chosen. How the three approaches to market monitoring differ is explained in The three approaches to market monitoring.