These are a few of my favourite things.

Digimind is a very powerful tool, with an impressive range of features.  During the training days I spend with our clients I'm in a priveleged position to hear how our users react the first time they see some of these features.  Every CI project is different, and everyone has their own personal working preferences, but there are still some parts of the platform that are guarenteed to please the whole training room.  Here are my top 4.

Words, words and more words

One of the initial questions you need to ask yourself is how to define what you are looking for in terms of keywords.  You might well have some ideas, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to check that your impressions are good?  And to supplement your ideas with other keywords drawn from the internet - the very place you will be using these keywords? 

The Semantic Thesaurus has been developed to answer exactly this need.  It will check the internet for your keyword and identify other words that are often associated with it (semantic field), replacement words (hyponyms - very useful for identifying competitors), synonymes and sometimes grammatical variations.  Digimind does a sweep of the internet to find the most recent words for these categories, meaning that the Semantic Thesaurus will always bring back relevant and up to date suggestions for you.  To find out more about how to use this feature, please follow this link.

Understand the bigger picture

The internet is a big place, full of information and it grows everyday.  It doesn't matter what you are trying to track, at some point it is going to be very useful to take a step back and see what's going on.  There are a number of ways that Digimind can let you do this, including generating your own graphs and analysis on your dashboard.  In addition, the DCF (Digimind Content Factory) is a quick, efficient and useful way to get into a subject.

Let's say that you need to find out what is happening with a competitor.  In this example, I am looking at Facebook, and using the Company Overview tab of the DCF results pages, I can see the following:

It's easy to detect the recent big stories:

• Paypal's mobile payment head has accepted a job at Facebook
• Facebook has recenlty bought Oculus
• Facebook has invested in land near their campus
• Facebook has partnerships with many companies
• etc., etc.

Further down the page, I'll also be able to see other top stories concerning awards, litigation, financial performance, plant closings and opening, and innovation.

In addition, all of the analysis on this tab are interactive.  I can click on a point on the analysis to open up the stories that lie behind.

There are in total four tabs on the DCF results page.  They have each been configured to present highlights from the mass of information on any given subject.

1. Results: The results of any articles or stories that match your keywords are presented here.  You will also find dynamic filters which help you to drill-down into the mass of information and quickly get to the parts that interest you most.  Find out more about the filters in the DCF by following this link.
2. Online Reputation: This tabs groups together news from the following sources: Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and the online press.  It also presents the trend line for quarterly buzz, a tag cloud for key concepts, and the top influencers on this subject.
3. Company Overview: This tab contains information about HR moves, mergers & acquitions, plant closing and openings, innovation, collaborations, product launches, awards, financial performance, and litigations and lawsuits.  It also displays the trend line for news on this company over the past year and the key concept trends (see above).
4. Visual Analysis: This tab contains 7 analysis based on your keyword search, enabling you to very quickly understand the key trends, concepts and talking points on any given subject.  You will find: key concepts trends; a geographical map (world); trend line over 3 months, type of source vs language matrice; top sources talking about this subject; key concepts tag cloud; and type of source breakdown.  And, of course, all of the graphs are clickable, allowing you to open them up and get into the articles and stories that lie behind the points that interest you.

Catch and Capitalise On The Fly

New information can come from many sources, both inside and outside of your Digimind platform.

• Inside: alerts from your agents & DCF results
• Outside: tiny URLs you pick up from the Tweetstream, links your colleagues and friends send you, things you find while browsing and looking for something totally different, etc.

A very useful feature of Digimind is our Bookmarklet.  This allows you to save information wherever you find it and store it directly into the correct Digimind folder.  When you click to open the Bookmarklet, a Digimind taskbar will display in the top right corner of the webpage:

Clicking on save will then allow you to edit and store the information in the right folder:

To find out more about the Bookmarklet watch this video.

See What You've Got

As you work with Digimind you will build up a base of stored information, spanning back over many years and potentially covering many different subjects.  One way to see what you've got on any subject is to open the project in question and dig around inside, a bit like looking for documents you have saved somewhere on your laptop or on the cloud.  Fortunately, to make life easier, Digimind has the My Reader feature.  Using this part of Digimind you can use filters, time period restrictions, tags and a search box.  From here, you can then select to create a report with the information you have.

The same interface is also available for setting up newsletters and Watchlists, and also displaying information on your dashboard.

To find out more about My Reader, read this post.

Thank You!

My favourite Digimind features were developed over months (or in some cases years) but our R&D teams.  Without the hard work of this dedicated team, none of what we love about Digimind would be possible.

Thank you Digimind Developers. : )