linkedin.svg

twitter.svg

Blog

<h2>Are you chasing vanity metrics or looking to genuinely connect with your audience? While there’s nothing wrong with retweets, shares, likes, etc., engagement doesn’t equal connection. You can’t trade upvotes for conversions. To convert your audience, you need to connect with them on a human level, and that’s where resonance comes in.</h2> <h2>What is Resonance?</h2>Simply put, it’s when two things vibrate together in harmony. In music, that means creating a sound that’s more beautiful than the sum of its parts. The individual notes amplify and reinforce one another. They resonate and create a link. Ideas work the same way. Certain ideas resonate or connect with specific groups. They sound like they’re naturally for and of that audience. Investment ideas resonate with financial people; travel content connects with folks planning a vacation, and so on. It isn’t a matter of using jargon, though; it's creating genuine person-to-person connection points and links that captivate specific communities. That's what our idea of resonance aims to fill. <h2>What is a Resonance Score?</h2>Now, when we talk about resonance, we're diving into psychology, not plucking strings on an instrument. And the core piece of info our A/B testing engine provides is the Resonance Score, a grade that predicts how well your message will align with your audience. <h2>Higher score = a message that resonates and connects better.</h2> We calculate your score by looking at the similarities between different beliefs and ideas, examining how they fit together and reflect each other in terms of values, emotions and psychology. It's all about finding that connection and the way we do it is to measure across nearly 90 social and psychological dimensions – in seconds.

<h2>How does CulturePulse predict your message will connect with your audience?</h2>The score is all well and good, but how is it different from using tools that utilize machine learning to find language patterns and produce content that social media platforms crave? Easy. Social media algorithms aren’t built to nurture connections (unfortunately); they’re designed to be toxic and addictive, promoting the provocative, the negative, and the extreme to capture attention. <h2>Attention isn’t connection.</h2> Relying on machine learning and engagement metrics like upvotes and retweets leads to replicating what already exists on those platforms and becoming part of the noise. And if you’re introducing something new to the market, you’re at even more of a disadvantage with that approach because there may not even be engagement metrics for what you’ve created. Stepping away from benchmarking everything against vanity metrics though, and stepping into benchmarking based on the interests and psychological profiles of your audience, allows you to do something truly innovative. Take Reddit, for instance. People already form their own little communities called subreddits, and that's where we dive in further. By analyzing all the posts and comments, sometimes millions of them, using our algorithm, we’re able to tap into the pulse of these communities. We create audience profiles based on culture, values, morality and more, not purely language. <a href="https://culturepulse.ai/blog/optimize-your-reddit-ads-in-minutes-not-weeks" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">And with a more human-focused algorithm, we’re able to look at how people connect with people – then predict what’s likely to work best in the future.</a> Are you going to get fewer upvotes? Maybe. Are you going to create a meaningful connection with your audience that gets you closer to your business goals? Certainly. It’s about meeting someone where they are, human to human, and injecting that language into your messaging. <h2>What’s Your Priority?</h2>It goes back to the question at the top, are you after vanity metrics or connection? Likes or conversions? By understanding the ideas that resonate and tailoring messages to your specific community, you'll forge genuine connections and reach your target audience like never before. Stop chasing engagement and shares, start creating messages that connect and convert. <h2><a href="https://app.culturepulse.ai/text-analysis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">Start testing now – for free</a></h2>

large_prateek-katyal-xv7-GlvBLFw-unsplash.jpeg

medium_prateek-katyal-xv7-GlvBLFw-unsplash.jpeg

small_prateek-katyal-xv7-GlvBLFw-unsplash.jpeg

thumbnail_prateek-katyal-xv7-GlvBLFw-unsplash.jpeg

prateek-katyal-xv7-GlvBLFw-unsplash.jpeg

The Secret to Connecting with Your Audience: Resonance

<h2>Highly engaged, community-focused, and opinionated, how can you be sure your ads break through on a platform where the skepticism of advertisers runs high?</h2> Whether you're new to Reddit advertising or looking to improve your existing strategy, creating effective and engaging ads requires a deep understanding of the platform's culture and user behavior. More importantly, it takes a commitment to testing, optimizing, and iterating to ensure your ad hits all the right notes for your audience (spoiler: we have a way to cut down the time and cost of that part significantly). Let’s touch on some of the best practices to get you there and how CulturePulse can play a big part in speeding up the process.

<h1>Know your audience and speak to what they care about</h1> First things first, and no matter which platform you’re on, you need to know who you’re talking to and where they are. On Reddit, that means finding your subreddit. With over<a href="https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-subreddits-does-reddit-have" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </a><a href="https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-subreddits-does-reddit-have" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">3 million subreddits</a> and<a href="https://www.redditinc.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </a><a href="https://www.redditinc.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">100,000 active communities</a>, the beautiful thing about the platform is that you can endlessly niche down and get your messages in front of exactly who you want to see them. A great ad in the wrong community is useful as a fork for soup. Reddit is synonymous with community, and with CulturePulse you can both find your community and speak to the specific topics that keep them engaged. With built-in audience and topic analysis tools, you can gauge everything from emotional sentiment to if they’d make good brand ambassadors or potential lifetime buyers, in addition to pinpointing exactly what they’re talking about. So, not only will you be able to understand your audience better, you’ll also be able to see the exact words they’re using in real-time and at a glance.

<h1>Create copy for Redditors</h1> More than any other digital space, Reddit has its own lingo, and your community will have its own jargon too. Mirror it. The only way to show you truly understand your audience is to speak their language and the platform's language authentically. As Reddit themselves note in their<a href="https://www.redditforbusiness.com/blog/creative-best-practices?_hsmi=255961195" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </a><a href="https://www.redditforbusiness.com/blog/creative-best-practices?_hsmi=255961195" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">best practices guide</a>, ”that means leaning into “Redditisms” or language and acronyms created by our users and uniquely found on Reddit.” A few examples; TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), TIL (today I learned), ELI5 (explain like I’m 5), and YSK (you should know). Don’t overdo it, though or you’ll quickly find yourself in cringe territory.And if you’re unsure how to write for Redditors, ask our AI-powered writing tool to create the copy for you from just a few simple pieces of information. You’ll get a crystal clear <a href="https://www.culturepulse.ai/lexicon/resonance-score" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Resonance Score</a>, which measures how well your message might connect with your audience – the higher the score, the better the potential connection.

Our AI-generated Reddit ad outperformed Pluto's original ad in both resonance score and style. See the undeniable results of our experimentation for yourself.

<h1>Test, optimize, and scale</h1> Does doing all of the above guarantee that your messages will connect with your audience? Not really. The only way to know what truly moves the needle and resonates is to get the ads out in front of them, look at the metrics, measure the engagement, monitor conversions and incrementally adjust accordingly. You’ll want to run A/B tests and see which version gets a better response, and as you sharpen your messaging through repeated tests, you can invest more in the ads that work to expand your reach. The trouble is, the testing doesn’t come cheap.The creative has a cost, running ads isn’t free, and the priciest part of all is the time that goes into both. With CulturePulse, you can avoid all of that and A/B test your Reddit ads against a replica of your exact target audience. This <a href="https://www.culturepulse.ai/lexicon/digital-twin" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">digital twin </a>audience is created by aggregating and analyzing the conversations in actual Reddit communities, meaning you can instantly test your messages with zero risk. Remember, our built-in AI writer can even write the copy for you.Test, fine-tune, retest, and run the ad to your real audience only after it hits the right notes. <h1>Optimizing that would ordinarily take weeks, and a nice chunk of ad spend now takes minutes.</h1> With these tips in tow, it’s time to get to the fun part, building your ads. Like every network, Reddit has its quirks and ways of doing things; creating compelling ads means understanding those and truly meeting your audience in their space. Tools like CulturePulse make that easier. <a href="https://app.culturepulse.ai/text-analysis" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">Get started for free.</a>

large_brett-jordan-0FytazjHhxs-unsplash.jpeg

medium_brett-jordan-0FytazjHhxs-unsplash.jpeg

small_brett-jordan-0FytazjHhxs-unsplash.jpeg

thumbnail_brett-jordan-0FytazjHhxs-unsplash.jpeg

brett-jordan-0FytazjHhxs-unsplash.jpeg

Optimize your Reddit ads in minutes – not weeks

In today's digital landscape, brands need to focus on more than delivering excellent products and services. They need to engender trust in their consumer base, too. According to <a href="https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/why-brands-should-be-thinking-more-about-community/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Adweek</a>, brands prioritizing community-building to establish trust benefit from increased loyalty, advocacy, and engagement. As consumers become increasingly socially conscious and digitally connected, they also want to connect with a larger community that shares their values and culture. But building a community requires more than free drinks at product launches or t-shirt giveaways at conventions. For brands to successfully build communities and trust, they need to understand what values resonate with their audiences and then commit time and creativity to nurture their community. This is where CulturePulse can help. Brands can use CulturePulse’s AI to measure the trust of existing consumers and potential ones with <a href="https://culturepulse.ai/lexicon/multi-agent-ai" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">multi-agent AI</a> <a href="https://culturepulse.ai/lexicon/digital-twin" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">digital twin</a> audiences. Once a brand has this measurement, it can gain valuable insights into how customers perceive their brand and then take action to build and strengthen consumer trust over time.

<h2>How can trust be measured?</h2> Academically, trust is often measured using survey questions. For example, the International Social Survey Programme has these two questions — among others — that are relevant for measuring trust:&nbsp; 1) Generally speaking, would you say that people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?&nbsp; 2) How often do you think that people would try to take advantage of you, if they got the chance, and how often would they try to be fair?” How people answer these questions can then be used to compare social trust across countries, as in the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207659.2020.1712048" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">survey on social networks and social resources</a>. Similarly, psychological trust can be measured using the General Trust Scale*, which posits: “Most people are basically honest” and “Generally, I trust others.”

<h2>Why is trust valuable for brands, advertising, and marketing?</h2> Customers need to know if they can trust a company. And companies need to know which people are more likely to trust them. A trusting relationship strengthens business on both sides. Moreover, fostering this kind of relationship is essential for community building.

<h2>How does CulturePulse measure trust?</h2> CulturePulse measures community-based trust in its AI ontology, which measures several factors of human psychology. For trust, CulturePulse focuses on key themes in texts that are indicative of trust or violations of trust, specifically: <ul><li>trust_virtue = things that signal trustworthiness</li><li>trust_vice = things that signal violations of trust or untrustworthiness.&nbsp;</li></ul> Other metrics within the ontology are also closely related. For example, CulturePulse measures harm and fairness morality. These categories overlap with trust because people want to trust that people will treat them fairly and not take advantage of them. If people don’t behave this way, they will not trust them in the future. Similarly, if someone harms someone else, that person won’t trust them later. But conversely, if someone keeps someone else from harm, it establishes trust between the two. This is why CulturePulse clusters trust with other aspects of morality in its system, even though it’s not part of the key moral foundations.

<h2>Why is Reddit more trusted for product information than other social media platforms?</h2> There are several reasons for this. First, the Reddit algorithm relies on community-based voting to decide what ranks higher in a feed. In this way, the things the community agrees on tend to be higher ranked. Second, unlike other social media platforms, Reddit has not been caught red-handed running ethically compromised experiments on its users.&nbsp; Reddit also harnesses the “wisdom of the crowds,” a principle in psychology that states that in many domains, one person might be wrong, but many people are — on average — very accurate in their assessments.&nbsp; Now, regarding other platforms running ethically compromised experiments on their users: When there are data breaches of user personally identifiable information (PII), these are significant breaches of trust. Users expect platforms to keep their data safe and be ethical in its use. Reddit, however, collects very little data on its users, basically a username and an email address. After that, Reddit asks users to be part of different communities without asking for PII. Because of this, users think less about what could go wrong with their data, and they immediately set out community building, which is what Reddit is primarily for. On other social media platforms, advertisers know about user relationships, families, jobs, and locations. They use this info to sell and serve relevant ads, which is how social media companies make money. On the other hand, Reddit relies on user interests when serving ads. Advertisers on Reddit target communities of people, not individuals, so PII isn’t needed. What’s valuable to advertisers is what communities users are part of and what those communities believe.&nbsp; CulturePulse doesn’t need PII either; its tech analyzes communities and markets by text, which is why its agency partners use CulturePulse tech to refine their messaging on Reddit.

<h2>Can CulturePulse help brands or businesses become more trustworthy?</h2> CulturePulse can help brands or businesses create messages that resonate with their audience regarding personality, moral foundations, and other dimensions. The better a brand can connect with its customer base, the more likely that customer base will trust that brand. But CulturePulse cannot help a company be more trustworthy; it can help brands understand what their customers think of them and then help those brands create messaging that engenders trust. <h2>Are you a brand?</h2> <a href="mailto:hello@culturepulse.ai" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Let’s talk</a> and find out how trustworthy and resonant your messaging is to your consumers on Reddit. You can also <a href="https://app.culturepulse.ai/auth/register" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">get started for free</a>. Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/fr/@faithgiant?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Alex Shute</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/bGOemOApXo4?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Unsplash</a> *See Jasielska, D., Rogoza, R., Zajenkowska, A. et al. General trust scale: validation in cross-cultural settings. Curr Psychol 40, 5019–5029 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-019-00435-2

medium_48387126437_30cd2a117c_c.jpg

small_48387126437_30cd2a117c_c.jpg

thumbnail_48387126437_30cd2a117c_c.jpg

48387126437_30cd2a117c_c.jpg

Why Trust Is Crucial for Brands and How CulturePulse Measures It

Imagine if policymakers could study hundreds of millions of news feeds around the world to help come up with policies for peace and stability in post-conflict societies. CulturePulse's collaboration with Cambridge University's Woolf Institute set out to achieve just that. <h2>Client: The Woolf Institute, Cambridge University</h2> The Woolf Institute is a research and academic institution within Cambridge University. It was founded to promote better understanding and dialogue between the world’s religions. Dr. Katherine O'Lone, a research fellow at the Woolf Institute, approached CulturePulse to use CulturePulse’s AI to better understand how changes in her primary interests of moral cognition and extremism, religion, pro-sociality, and morality are reflected through the news in post-conflict Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and South Sudan.

Northern Ireland's average Goldstein score for the news in a given month.

Scores above 0 are (on average) cooperative. Scores below 0 are (on average) conflict related.  A Goldstein Score measures conflict intensity; it ranges from -10 to 10, with 10 being peaceful actions and -10 being violent/deadly conflict.

The Balkan's average Goldstein score for the news in a given month.

See above for the score breakdown.

South Sudan's average Goldstein score for the news in a given month.

See above for the score breakdown.

<h2>Challenge</h2> Traditional research in social psychology relies on lab-based or survey-based data, often with WEIRD biases*. Additionally, traditional research cannot scale quickly enough to provide immediate, meaningful impact for policymakers in post-conflict societies. These were critical factors that the researchers were looking to overcome. Cambridge University needed a scalable technological solution to overcome these pain points in their research on sociological elements such as forgiveness and justice in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and South Sudan — no matter the differences in religiosity or socioeconomic status. With CulturePulse AI, the Woolf Institute could study millions of before-out-of-reach data points from global news streams. Another challenge Cambridge University faced was finding the correct data within the existing data. The CulturePulse team sifted through a dataset of 52 million news articles from the areas for the study using the <a href="https://www.gdeltproject.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">GDELT Project</a>. Still, once CulturePulse’s CEO (Justin E. Lane, D. Phil.) and CRO (Prof. F. LeRon Shults, Ph.D., Ph.D.) looked at the data with Dr. O’Lone, they realized a lot of it was related to crime in each area, not conflict.

<h2>Solution</h2> To find what they were looking for, the CulturePulse team refined its search by focusing on specific actors and actions related to conflicts and adding two new dimensions — forgiveness and revenge —&nbsp;to the CulturePulse AI ontology, bringing the total to 91 tracked dimensions. Next, CulturePulse worked with the Woolf Institute to work through biases and assumptions about peace. For example, one early assumption was that forgiveness would be highly correlated with cooperation events and negatively correlated with conflict events. And while forgiveness has traditionally been studied at an individual level, CulturePulse is able to track forgiveness at a macro level over the last decade of history in each country. After the CulturePulse team cleaned and prepared the data and augmented the AI ontology with help from the Woolf Institute team, they were ready to proceed with the research using a behaviorally and psychologically accurate <a href="https://www.culturepulse.ai/lexicon/digital-twin" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">digital twin</a> created with <a href="https://www.culturepulse.ai/lexicon/multi-agent-ai" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">multi-agent artificial intelligence</a>.

<h2>Results</h2> What Dr. O’Lone and her team at Cambridge discovered from the CulturePulse analysis surprised them. Forgiveness didn’t rank as an important factor in any of the three conflict areas. So while forgiveness is highly related to moral domains that already exist in CulturePulse’s ontology — moral domains which have shown to be the number one predictors of conflict and cooperation — it didn’t prove to be predictive in this study.

Fairness proved to be more predictive. In the context of Northern Ireland, concerns about fairness were what drove cooperation. In the context of all three areas, fairness and harm regularly arose in discussions from the data and the results, leading Dr. O’Lone to surmise that any discussion of group-level forgiveness should be built around policies of fairness. From a peace-building perspective, based on this new understanding of fairness and harm, the Woolf Institute can now recommend that policymakers create policy focusing on unification. Creating policies that have authority as the moral foundation will always leave one group behind, creating further divisions, which is always dangerous.

<h2>Conclusion</h2> CulturePulse digital twin AI technology helped the Woolf Institute gain valuable insights into elements of forgiveness and justice in post-conflict societies. Through the collaboration with Dr. O’Lone and the CulturePulse team, both sides successfully challenged bias and assumptions while augmenting CulturePulse’s proprietary AI. The results of the study suggest that fairness and harm are key moral domains that affect cooperation and conflict and, therefore, should be the basis for constructive policy-making in post-conflict areas worldwide. The success of this project has shown the potential of AI technology in academic research and policymaking, particularly in the intersection between psychology and policy.

<h2>Next steps</h2> Cambridge University sees CulturePulse’s AI as integral to the future of academic research and policymaking. By using data-driven policymaking, policymakers can create more effective and efficient policies, leading to better outcomes for their citizens. However, the world cannot rely on standard approaches in AI to create policy solutions for two reasons: 1) There often isn’t enough data on policy outcomes because, typically, only one policy is tried in a community to solve a problem, not many. Also, many samples are required to train traditional machine learning solutions. 2) Typical AI systems arrive at mathematically optimal answers, which are not always optimal for complex human societies.﻿With a human-in-the-loop approach to policymaking and research that leverages CulturePulse AI and the leading experts on conflict, there is potential to produce results that address some of the world’s most pressing issues — conflict — while taking into account its most human traits — culture and religion. * WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) is a social psychological bias borne of a 2010 study showing that 85% of all psychological research is conducted on Westerners, like second-year undergraduates in America, thus posing an endemic problem of existing knowledge of the human mind on a massive scale. ﻿Henrich, J., Heine, S. &amp; Norenzayan, A. Most people are not WEIRD.&nbsp;Nature&nbsp;466, 29 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466029a

Maps showing conflict density in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and South Sudan

Blog

The Secret to Connecting with Your Audience: Resonance

Are you chasing vanity metrics or looking to genuinely connect with your audience? While there’s nothing wrong with retweets, shares, likes, etc., engagement doesn’t equal connection. You can’t tr...

Optimize your Reddit ads in minutes – not weeks

Why Trust Is Crucial for Brands and How CulturePulse Measures It

How CulturePulse AI Helped Cambridge University Understand Conflict in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and South Sudan

Company

Product

Blog