SIGNAL
What the world tells you
Most listening tools report volume. Volume is the wrong number.
A broad set of sources, watched continuously by an agent that runs on its own schedule rather than waiting to be asked. Sentiment and topic clustering, share of voice against your competitors, and a relevance test that refuses to keep a mention it cannot explain, then shows you exactly what it set aside.
What Social Listening is
Social Listening runs continuously, without anyone starting it, watching what people say about your brand across news, social, forums, communities and both major app stores. It reports sentiment, clusters what people are talking about, tracks your share of the category conversation against competitors, surfaces the language your customers actually use, and writes a digest. What distinguishes it is what it refuses to keep. A mention that merely shares a word with your brand name, or that mentions you without being about you, is set aside with a stated reason you can read and overrule.
The problem
A dashboard full of mentions that nobody reads.
The usual failure is not too little data. It is a rising line on a chart that turns out to be a coincidence: a brand whose name is also a common word, a competitor's quarterly results, a listicle that mentioned you once. The team learns within a month that the number does not mean anything, stops opening the tool, and the subscription renews anyway. A listening tool that cannot tell you why something is in the count has not saved you the work of reading everything.
What you get
What it reports
Sentiment and topics over time
Movement week by week with the spike explained rather than just marked, and what people actually talk about grouped rather than listed.
Explained
Share of the conversation
How much of the category conversation is yours against the competitors the rest of the platform is already tracking.
One competitor set
The words your customers use
Rarely the words in your brand book, and the earliest signal that a market has moved. Available to the people writing, not quoted in a monthly deck.
Into the creative
Gaps against your own voice
Where how people describe you diverges from how your brand says it should sound. Nobody else joins those two up.
Unique to the platform
In practice
Volume is the easy number. It is also the wrong one.
The first question anyone asks about a filter is what it took out. A filter that cannot answer that is asking for trust it has not earned, so ours shows every set-aside item with the reason attached and lets you disagree with it.
Coverage
Where it listens
| Kind of source | What that covers |
|---|---|
| News | Wire services and news APIs, national and regional |
| Social | The major networks, plus the ones that matter in your market specifically |
| Forums and communities | Where category conversation actually happens rather than where it is loudest |
| App stores | Both major stores, where product complaints surface first |
| Anything else you need | Additional sources added where a brand has one that matters |
Breadth is the easy part and every tool claims it. What to ask about is the relevance test: whether the count can be traced back to the mentions behind it.
Where it connects
What the conversation feeds
- Brand DNA gets a gap report where how people describe you diverges from how you say you sound.
- Content Studio can write in the language customers actually use, taken from the mentions rather than invented.
- Competitor Radar shares the competitor list, so listening and research are about the same set of companies.
- Command Center surfaces the mentions that need a reply today, rather than leaving them in a report.
Questions
Social Listening, answered
How is this different from Meltwater or Brandwatch?
They have far more scale, history and media relations depth, and we say so plainly. What we have is relevance that can explain itself, and everything it learns feeding the part of the platform that writes your next campaign.
What happens to mentions the filter sets aside?
They stay visible with the reason attached, and you can overrule the filter. Nothing is silently deleted.
Can it track competitors as well as us?
Yes, and share of voice depends on it. The competitor list is shared with Competitor Radar so the two agree.
How far back does it go?
Collection starts when you set up keywords. Historical depth varies by source, since each has its own limits on how far back it will serve.
Does it cover regional languages?
Collection is language-agnostic at the source level. Analysis quality is strongest in English today, which is an honest limitation rather than a feature.
How often does it collect?
On a nightly schedule, and on demand when you want to check something now.
See what is actually being said about your brand.
Give us your brand name and three competitors, and we will run a collection before the call so you see real mentions rather than a sample.