[Interview] Patrick Charlton, Buzz Radar: Making Social Insights Accessible, Insightful and Actionable

Who are you and what are you doing at Demo Day?

I’m Patrick Charlton, one of the co-founders of Buzz Radar. Since 2012 we’ve been developing cutting edge social intelligence and visualisation technology. We’ve spent the past 8 years helping some of the biggest brands in the world gain insights from social and audience intelligence and build a strategy based on it. At Demo Day we’ll be taking our new Audience Analysis AI for a spin. We’ll tell the story of how a tech company avoided a major misstep with a new product launch by having a data driven understanding of their target audience.

Who should come to check you out?

Anyone looking to understand and develop a brand successfully should come by, especially if they find it sometimes really overwhelming to find answers to the questions they want to be answered about their brand, competitors and audience. We’re also a great platform for anyone who is worried that their organisation and partners overly rely on guesswork when it comes to understanding their target audience and creating content for them. And anyone looking to move their brand to a more data-driven approach should come check us out. We’re excited to talk to everyone about our capabilities!

Why is now the time to be investing in social intelligence (and your solution!)?

According to Forbes in the past three months, social media activity has increased by 61%. The pandemic has accelerated a trend where more and more consumers purchasing decisions are influenced by content published on social media. Having a data-driven social strategy is now becoming critical to even the most traditionally-minded brands. Being able to make decisions based on easy-to-understand actionable insights exponentially increases the chances of a brand’s success.

What one word sums up your business?

Actionable.

What’s the best use case(s) for your technology?

Wow, there are a lot, but let’s start with two we’ve seen be really successful recently.

Firstly, brands launching a new product and really want to understand their audience are a great use case. We can provide really deep but actionable insight so they can understand the core personality traits of the audience they are targeting. They then can develop content that is really effective at connecting with them on a personal level.

Secondly, medium-to-larger-sized organisations who are struggling with getting a handle on social and their online audience in general are another great use case. Buzz Radar is really easy to use and extremely visual, so we’ve become a massively effective tool in communicating insight to internal teams who are not experts in the field. From the C-suite to sales teams, everyone has access to needed and useful data.

What makes your technology and/or approach unique? What’s your USP?

We have three USPs we are well known for:

1. Our unique AI audience intelligence that we’ve built over the past couple of years with assistance with IBM enables us to psychometrically profile followers, influencers and those discussing a brand in a deeper, more meaningful way than ever before. Audience AI reads all the publicly available posts from an individual to learn about their personality traits, interests, professions, culture and consumer preferences that drive an audience and then compares it to your content to see how well it resonates with them.

2. Our platform is the easiest to use in the industry. It’s designed for marketers rather than data analysts, so it’s easy to use and extract actionable insights from. Our Dashboards are built on our proprietary real-time data visualisation and are recognised as some of the most advanced in the world.

3. Our small nimble team focused on getting the best results for our clients rather than exponential growth. We have no outside investors pressuring us to gain new customers at all costs. That allows us to work closely with our clients and do things like rapidly develop custom functionality to our platform to fulfill their unique requirements. We also believe that technology is only ever part of the solution and that people and processes are the other two critical factors. This means we don’t stop when the technology is built but when the client’s challenge is met.

What's the best thing about working in social intelligence?

We are a team that loves a challenge. Working in social intelligence means that we are constantly re-evaluating our product and the climate. What’s working best? What’s changing? What is driving consumers? We love learning and meeting new challenges. Working in social intelligence means that we are constantly evolving.

Join Patrick for Buzz Radar’s demo at the Social Intelligence Tech Demo Day, see our full agenda here. Social Intelligence Tech Demo Day is run by The Social Intelligence Lab to help social data professionals see behind the tools and tech, receive expert advice on how to compare and choose technologies, and receive demos in a no pressure sales environment. Join us, for free.

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