Pluaris Tutorials are to help you understand and use various features in better way so that you can get the maximum benefit in saving you time, increasing your productivity, and making you efficient in knowledge management.
What is the purpose of Topic Monitoring?
Topic monitoring automatically retrieves relevant news articles from public sources every 24 hours. The standard version has built-in features to scour recent news articles to help you stay on top of all developments. The same functionality is easily configurable for private data feeds from enterprise tools like emails, instant messaging, drives, CRMs, customer issue resolution, and others (ask your Pluaris sales representative for more information on Integrations).
Once configured and integrated, Pluaris synthesizes the latest developments related to your topics from public and private sources, including those that you manually upload (your documents, notes, books, and others).
What do you mean by topics?
Business users – Topics are names of customers, suppliers, competition, influencers products, groups, trade-shows, demand drivers, supply-side constraints, technologies or processes, laws and compliance changes that affect your business, and other topics that are of interest to you when you communicate with your peers or look for information using web search engines.
Private Users: Topics are names of hobbies, teachings and learnings from influencers, health-related, sports, readings on any matter of importance to you, skills, best practices, personality traits you cherish, or for that matter anything that comes to your mind where you’d like to learn more.
This seems like a lot of work. What are the benefits?
According to a McKinsey report, we spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. On average, that’s 9.3 hours per week! Current enterprise search solutions lack efficiency and end up wasting hours of precious time.
Once you set up auto monitoring and integrate your daily tools, then Pluaris pulls out useful information rather than you going to fetch it. In addition, for virtually any significant topic of interest, the amount of textual information available and continually generated is vastly more than can be consumed by an individual. Pluaris brings the most relevant news to your feed, helping you cope with the problem of information overload.
Thanks to modern technology, we are constantly bombarded with new inputs (e-mails, instant messages, social media, and more) reducing your attention span, making you multi-task, leading all too often to TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read). The information that you do find time to read is easily forgotten. We all, as humans, suffer from a highly imperfect memory recall. Even if we retain some of the key insights, the details are almost certainly lost.
Even when working in teams, you often end up researching the same content as your colleagues, and too much of the information acquired by one individual is lost in translation with the communication process to others.
Setting up Pluaris starting with entering your topics helps address all of these issues.
Tell me more about Topic Monitoring. How will it resolve the problems you outlined above?
Set up daily monitoring for automated capture of relevant news articles to create an annotated feed in the Articles tab on your topics of interest, be it for personal or professional use.
Each day, the five most relevant articles per topic as published publicly within the last few days will be added to Reader section. As an article card.
Each article card contains
- SUMMARY of the article allowing you to quickly scan to learn the key points before you decide to do a detailed reading. Pluaris has a built-in process to pull out these key points, which answer the question of what this article is talking about.
- DRIVERS are the reasons for actions (the why’s) and establish the foundation for future cause and effect analysis to assist in problem-solving. These categories are visible in The default view is for Business Intelligence but for other use cases like education, the categories for DRIVERS will differ.
- OUTCOME is an interpretive assessment performed by Pluaris segregating the content as risks, opportunities, and neither (or informational). It is akin to the sentiment analysis that is discussed ever so often in the industry but having a larger value-add for businesses. Our proprietary models gauge the sentiment of the content and then look at the relation between topics and entities. As an example, if the topic is related to a customer to whom you sell, then if the sentiment of the content is positive the outcome is ‘opportunity”. Otherwise, if the relation is competitive then it is “risk”, and if the sentiment is neutral then it is “informational”. You will see a detailed breakdown of each of the outcomes in the Control panel.
- CATEGORY is an interpretive assessment performed by Pluaris by aggregating DRIVERS a set of main categories to lay the foundation of future Cause and Effect analysis to assist in problem-solving. This aggregated view is visible on Control panel.
- RELATED ARTICLE(S) is where Pluaris suggests two (as default but the counter can be changed per customer’s preference) other related articles from your Personal Knowledge Base, including articles from daily auto-monitoring of public sources, personal uploads, and private enterprise tools, if integrated with Pluaris.
- ARTICLE TAG(S) allow users to categorize their articles. Users can then search for their files using these tags under FILTERS.
- COMPANY(S), PRODUCT(S), PEOPLE, LOCATION(S), and OTHER categories are automatic annotations by Pluaris, also called labeling. As humans, when we read we label information mentally, which leads to comprehension since we are mentally trying to understand the context by breaking down the content into:
– ‘who’ as people are involved (PEOPLE),
– ‘which’ company are we talking about (COMPANY),
– ‘where’ is the action (LOCATION),
– ‘what’ is it about (PRODUCT),
– what are we talking about (SUMMARY), and
– ‘why’ are we talking about this point (DRIVERS).
– OTHER captures when, how, and how much.
The Article card contains a sample of the labels. At the back-end, the entire list of annotation is available. This can be made available to the users for them to view at periodical intervals.
The Pluaris off-the-shelf standard offering is pre-trained to annotate data across industry segments. It offers high precision from the very beginning. Humans make errors and so do our algorithms for annotating. Hence, we allow users to make edits in labeling as they work with Pluaris. The process for editing is explained in the Tips included with Control panel.
The annotations of time and event allows for time graphs to be made leading to custom built Business Intelligence enabling users to speed up problem solving and make faster and better decisions.
I’m convinced! How do I set up Topic Monitoring?
For a simple but complete description of how to set up Topic Monitoring, check out the Pluaris User Guide, and click on the Topic Monitoring topic in the left menu. For help inside the Pluaris app, see the Tips button.
Here’s some additional information on the Relationship option in Topic Monitoring (the field marked “Select how this topic relates to you”). This Relationship affects the results for OUTCOME, as outlined above.
The default is Other, which means that Pluaris will not analyze articles retrieved under this topic as possible risks and opportunities (R&O). R&O analysis is typically available in Reader under OUTCOME, or in Control Panel in the section that tabulates feed as Risks, Opportunities, or Informational. With this default setting, all articles will be marked as informational.
However, if you are a business user especially belonging to the functions of sales, marketing, BD, and strategy and business planning then you would likely want to click on the drop down to select from the options of how the topic relates to you.
If the topic is a name of a COMPANY, INDUSTRY, PRODUCT, OR SELF (if you are monitoring articles about yourself like product reviews on social media or OTHER (when its none of the above) then select the relation that best applies as follows:
COMPANY: choose from one of the options of whether the company is a customer, competitor, supplier, new customer prospect, or other.
INDUSTRY: choose from one of the options of whether the industry is the one that you compete with, sell to it, buy from it, or is one that is adjacent to you carrying the risk that if it grows it can replace you (e.g., landlines were replaced by mobile phones).
PRODUCT: choose from one of the options of whether the product is the one that you buy or sell or compete with or none of the above hence ‘other’.
SELF: if the topic relates to you like the name of your own product, or your company, or your personal topics like hobbies or personality traits that you want to inculcate within yourself, then choose ‘Self’.
How to organize your golden nuggets of information – Use Notebook. The Tutorial is coming soon.
How to use filters to drill down to much required pieces of information -The Tutorial is coming soon.
