• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 8, 2013

Sharing something publicly online attracts marketers wanting to learn more about what consumers think, feel, know and share on social media and search platforms -- not just about their products, but also competitors. Digimind has followed the trend, releasing a social monitoring tool Tuesday that combines both.

The Digimind Social platform attempts to answer what, when, where, who and how people talk about the brand or the products. "It helps to eliminate surprises," said Patrice Francois, Digimind co-founder.

The tool also helps marketers compare their company's results with another to benchmark results against the competition. The algorithm queries dozens of platforms to aggregate millions of sources, supporting nearly all languages. Other than English, sentiment analysis gets applied to nine languages such as German, Spanish, and Italian.  

By understanding what consumers discuss, share and search for online, marketers gain a better understanding of what brands should provide. The tool also supports a module that monitors searches across engines and platforms. It analyzes the first 1,000 results on Google from each country to give marketers insight into interests.

At 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Benelux, marketers use Digimind Social to monitor buzz on forthcoming DVD releases like "Croods," "Wolverine 2," and "Percy Jackson 2." They optimize marketing campaigns based on trending topics, Francois said. Not only do the marketers want to know the positive sentiment, but they use the social tool to determine possible copyright threats to streaming properties through peak in activities and volume of mentions.

Consumers produce, on average, 4.5 billion Facebook likes, 400 million tweets and 5 billion Google searches daily, per Digimind. The company's algorithm analyzes the results and produces one-click reporting that generates insights in a variety of formats. It can turn the data into a PowerPoint document. The dashboard allows marketers to enter their own category too, such as batteries for a specific smartphone.

Digimind ran its own query to determine the sentiment around old vs. new media. It turns out that traditional media like print and television received 44% more mentions on social media compared with online media. Old media also gets more mentions on Twitter compared with new -- in fact it is three times more likely. When it comes to share of voice, The New York Times took 26%; USA Today, 24%; The Wall Street Journal, 22%; The Huffington Post, 11%; BuzzFeed, 9%; and Mashable, 8%.