Online, public opinion can change with a single tweet. Consumer trust is at an all-time low, and brands are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their reputations. In an age where trust can be lost in the blink of an eye, tracking your brand’s reputation in real time is more important than ever before.
Pitted against this challenging backdrop, traditional reputation intelligence lacks the flexibility needed to conduct audience and brand reputation management in real-time. Most provide flat, binary answers to basic questions, providing brand and PR managers with nothing more than the most top-level feedback.
These more traditional methods are slow, expensive, and limited to providing information solely on the questions asked – making it easy to miss key chunks of information, simply because you didn’t know the right question to ask.
Your Audience is not a monolith
As Pulsar’s CEO and co-founder Francesco D’Orazio explains, “No audience is a monolith. Every audience is a complex system of interwoven communities. If you really want to understand how your brand is perceived and communicate a message that’s relevant, it’s important to map the communities which make up that audience and understand how they’re playing back your brand and the issues you care about”.
Let’s say you’re an international climate change organisation, and you want to communicate a message around sustainability,” says D’Orazio. “The story you’ll tell will be completely different depending on the context. If you’re talking to an audience of financial analysts, they might be talking about the supply chain. If you’re talking to activists, they might be talking about politics. If you’re talking to parents, they might be talking about the future of their kids. These are all very different angles to communicate the same issue.
In order to reach and resonate with these different groups, brand and PR managers need a system that allows them to understand what kinds of angles are relevant for which communities, see the world through their eyes and structure your communications accordingly.
Managing misinformation
Misinformation is another key challenge faced by brand and PR managers, and one that traditional reputation intelligence fails to tackle. Public opinion can easily be swayed by misinformation, so it’s critical to be able to detect early signals of misinformation and measure the impact those narratives are having on public opinion.
In order to better meet these challenges, audience intelligence platform Pulsar – Isentia’s audience intelligence sister company – has launched a first-of-its-kind integration with NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of news sources. The integration detects early signals of misinformation, measures the impact of those narratives on public opinion, and helps public relations and marketing professionals respond quickly to protect their brand’s reputation. NewsGuard’s standardized criteria for measuring source trustworthiness adds a new layer to the audience, media and public conversation understanding inherent to Pulsar.
Pulsar allows clients to track and analyze relevant public conversations with custom AI that is tailored to your brand, industry and reputation framework. It provides the same precision and structure of survey data, in real-time, while also keeping tabs on misinformation related to your brand.
Going beyond generic AI
Instead of approaching AI with a generic lens, like sentiment or topic, Pulsar’s AI allows marketing professionals to achieve practical insights that are specific to their industry – from personality traits to the customer experience moments relevant to their brand.
In essence, it’s a new way of asking:
- What stories about my brand are being told by what groups of people?
- How can I understand how my brand is being perceived and played back by different communities within the audience?
- And how is misinformation influencing those communities?
By moving beyond the binary feedback of traditional reputational intelligence, Pulsar is able to break down your brand’s audience into communities, and then map those stories and narratives against those communities. It’s reputation intelligence – but not as you know it – yet.