How to monitor a competitor

The Digimind platform can be used to track your own company, brand and reputation as well as keeping an eye on your competitors. 

Use DCF search

Possibly the quickest way to find out about your competitors is to run their company name through the DCF search. 

On the first tab “News” you will see the latest news about a company.  However, just having access to a lot of information does not mean that you know anything new.  Digimind lets you filter the information by event, country, company, type of source, people and concept.  This means you can focus on the type of information you need.

In addition, any of the filters you activate on the first results tab will be applied to the other three tabs of the DCF search results. 

For example, a search for Ferrari brings back far too much information for one person to treat in a day not all of which may be relevant to my needs:

However, I can apply filters for a particular country, event and / or concept to get more focused results.  Then when I move to the other tabs for DCF search, these choices will remain active.

The following two tabs contain information about online reputation and also give a company overview.  Your use of these two will depend on your business objectives and your reasons for wanting to monitor your competitors in the first place.

The final tab present a visual analysis of information about your search term.

Use lists in DCF

It is possible to further enhance the precision of the DCF using a list.

Many companies today are known by more than one name:

• Coca-Cola, Coke
• Ford, Ford Motors, Ford Motor Company
• Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Pricewaterhousecoopers, PWC

You can create a list which contains all the possible permutations and possibilities for a company’s name, including any affiliates or brand names if you wish.  This list can then be used during your DCF search:

For example:

This list will go into the DCF search like this:

In addition, you can use more than one list in a DCF search, which will allow you to include your competitor’s name and words relevant to your specific industry or product type.

And, you are able to apply the filters mentioned above to this of search result.

Use lists to present information

Another way to use lists while tracking competitors is to create a list containing multiple competitors.  This will enable you to create visual analytics based on your group of companies.  In this way you can easily compare how each is comparing for a particular subject or theme.

Track corporate websites

The add feed wizard lets you track corporate websites and will automatically identify if a page contains an RSS feed or web news.  You can combine this with a query in the agent so that you will be informed not just of new information on the page, but only of the information you need for your CI project.  For example, although I want to find out about Nissan’s hybrid cars, the other information displayed on their news center is out of my scope.

Keywords combined with source types

Inside the add feed wizard is another powerful tool.  It is possible to search the invisible web for information on a given keyword or set of keywords.  In this way, Digimind will bring to you information about patents and academic research, or, if you need, a more consumer based approach from Twitter, Facebook and video sources. Again, this technique can be combined with a query, depending on your needs.

Profiles

And finally, it is possible to create profiles for companies, products, people, etc. in order to compare a selection and carry out benchmarking.  For more information on how to benchmark using Digimind Profiles, please follow this link.

The information fields in a profile can be either automatically updated (for example for share price) or manually updated (company name, mission statement, etc.).