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As 2023 began, CulturePulse was poised at an exciting juncture. Our initial focus was on marketing, driven by the understanding that much of the world's division is exacerbated by the suggestion algorithms of social media. These algorithms often amplify the worst aspects of human interaction for higher engagement. CulturePulse, with its advanced AI that comprehends cultural nuances and emotional intelligence, aimed to help brands connect more authentically, bypassing the manipulative tendencies of these algorithms.

In the early months, our efforts were centered around refining our AI technologies to enhance marketing strategies. We believed that by understanding and integrating cultural sensitivities and emotional contexts, brands could engage with audiences more meaningfully, promo=ting unity rather than division. However, as the year progressed, we observed a growing global need for social cohesion and conflict resolution. Recognizing our unique position, CulturePulse made a strategic pivot. Our mission, from the outset, was to harness AI for greater understanding and connection between people. The escalating global conflicts and social fragmentation underscored the need for this mission now more than ever. Embracing this shift, we redirected our resources and focus towards peacebuilding and policy-making, leveraging our AI to address these critical global challenges.

The latter part of 2023 saw CulturePulse making significant strides in this new direction. We collaborated with renowned institutions, including researchers at the University of Cambridge and the United Nations, to apply our technology in some of the world's most complex conflict zones, such as Northern Ireland, South Sudan, the Balkans, Ukraine, and Palestine. This led us to on the ground work, where our co-founders were able to experience first hand the realities of the West Bank, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland, with all their beauty and hope, despite what violence there may be. Our AI systems provided valuable insights into cultural and moral dynamics, highlighting common values that could serve as a basis for dialogue and understanding in these divided regions. <img src="https://culturepulse-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2023_in_Review_2cd4df5927.png" alt="2023_in_Review.png">

As we look to 2024, CulturePulse is energized by ambitious goals. We plan to expand our ARES conflict tracking platform, aiming to cover over 100 nations. We are well on our way to having full coverage of the EU and NATO by Q2 2024. This platform will offer scientifically-backed insights into the drivers of peace and cooperation, enabling more effective conflict mitigation strategies on a global scale. Our vision for 2024 is not just to contribute to resolving current conflicts but to proactively shape a world where understanding and collaboration preempt division and strife.

At CulturePulse, we believe that our work transcends traditional business objectives. We are committed to leveraging our advanced AI not just for commercial success but as a tool for global betterment. Our goal is to reshape how societies engage with and resolve conflicts both online and offline, big and small, fostering a world that prioritizes understanding and peace over division and discord.

Overall, 2023 has been a year of growth, adaptation, and realignment for us. We started the year focusing on marketing but pivoted to peacebuilding and policy-making as we recognized the urgent global need for these applications of our AI technology. Looking forward, we are committed to expanding our influence and impact, driven by the belief that our AI can play a pivotal role in creating a more harmonious and understanding world.

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CulturePulse: 2023 in Review

Spoiler: sentiment analysis is not enough to confidently understand your audience’s behavior. And in the ever-evolving world we live in, deep understanding is critical for improving everything from engagement to conversion. Enter CulturePulse—a tool that takes you beyond mere sentiment and opens up a world of dimensions that paint a crystal-clear picture of your community. In this blog, we'll introduce you to the concept of dimensions, why they’re the key to ensuring your content connects, and how to use them. <h2>Problem: People Are More Than Positive, Negative or Neutral Emotions</h2>Though handy and employed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and IBM, sentiment analysis falls well short of unraveling the intricate tapestry of beliefs and motivations that truly move people to action. We’re complex animals it turns out! Not to mention, sentiment analysis hinges on historical data (read: old), meaning it fails to keep up with rapidly changing behaviors and trends. Not ideal for making decisions. <h2>Solution: Understand the Beliefs that Drive Behavior</h2>Belief systems, on the other hand, change far less frequently, offering more reliable and up-to-the-minute analysis of your audience. Think about it: how often do your core beliefs really shift? With CulturePulse, you get a richer, deeper dive into what makes your community unique and what motivates their actions. Say goodbye to superficial insights and hello to a more profound understanding of your audience. Analysis across 93 dimensions allows our algorithm to decode beliefs and predict behavior with a &gt;95% correlation to real-world outcomes. In other words, it’s pretty dang accurate. <h2>Hold On, What’s a Dimension?</h2>Think of it as a specific, measurable characteristic that provides profound insights into the traits and preferences that spur your audience into action. Dimensions are the building blocks of a comprehensive understanding of your community.<h3> </h3><h3>The More Dimensions, the Clearer the Picture</h3>93 vs 1. That’s what you’re looking at with sentiment analysis vs. nearly 100 dimensions that cover a wide expanse of human behavior and experience. The dimensions fall into more than a dozen categories; let's take a closer look at a few of them:<h4> </h4><h4>Psychological Certainty</h4>The degree of confidence and conviction your audience has and how easy or difficult it is to persuade them. By understanding psychological certainty, you can tailor your messaging to either reinforce existing beliefs or gently nudge your community toward new perspectives. <h4>Personality</h4>Insights into how your audience scores on each of the <a href="https://www.testgorilla.com/blog/how-to-interpret-the-results-of-a-big-5-ocean-assessment/?utm_term=&amp;utm_campaign=Performance+Max+%7C+Premium+Old&amp;utm_source=google&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;hsa_acc=4932434860&amp;hsa_cam=14324002500&amp;hsa_grp=&amp;hsa_ad=&amp;hsa_src=x&amp;hsa_tgt=&amp;hsa_kw=&amp;hsa_mt=&amp;hsa_net=adwords&amp;hsa_ver=3&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQjwj5mpBhDJARIsAOVjBdpT_mXVMxB8NVjs_37Xfg9ENLzsxIdKPUxRPNa46PCYtZmQ9rkaRG0aAoioEALw_wcB" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">Big Five personality traits</a>—Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN). Together, these traits paint a clearer picture of what motivates someone, so tailoring your messaging to match specific personality traits can significantly improve its resonance. ﻿<img src="https://culturepulse-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/Suggestions_Image_e59770d52b.png" alt="Suggestions Image.png" style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400;"> <h4>Moral Concerns</h4>Signals that define an audience's political position, particularly concerning authority, fairness, harm, ingroup loyalty, purity, and liberty. Understanding your audience's moral concerns can help you craft messages that align with their values and beliefs, creating a stronger connection and more robust engagement. ﻿This is just a tiny glimpse of the tools CulturePulse equips you with to decode your audience's beliefs and motivations, helping you create messages that truly resonate. <h3>How to use dimension analysis in the real world</h3>Data and dimensions are great but how do you transform them into actions that help activate and inspire more of your community? For starters, with the<a href="https://culturepulse.ai/blog/allow-users-to-do-more-with-api-integrations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </a><a href="https://culturepulse.ai/blog/allow-users-to-do-more-with-api-integrations" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">CulturePulse API</a>, you can plug in your audience data and interact with any dimension individually, which means highly specialized analysis of the exact traits that push the right buttons with your community.Here’s what it looks like in practice:<ul><li>Tailor content to specific personality traits</li><li>Speak to cultural and political alignment</li><li>Enhance persuasion and certainty</li><li>Craft moral and ethical messages</li><li>Refine gender-specific marketing</li><li>Foster inclusive social dynamics</li><li>Connect with personal values</li></ul>The list goes on. <h2>Understand your audience on a deeper level</h2>If the goal is to connect, it’s time to move past mere sentiment.Why only work with positive, negative, and neutral when you can tap into the whole inner world of your community with CulturePulse? Contact our sales team at hello@culturepulse.ai to learn more about enhancing your software with CulturePulse integration today.

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Beyond Sentiment: How CulturePulse Reshapes Audience Insights

17 sites were trading my information actively. I don’t get a penny for this information…but these companies are making billions.

Social media platforms have long made their living turning their users into products for advertisers and businesses to profit from; collecting and selling data has been business as usual for so long that it almost feels like an immutable truth. But it doesn’t have to be. As the AI revolution takes shape and continues to weave its way into our daily lives, the questions around data ethics become increasingly imperative. Why? Because data – and lots of it – is the backbone of all the emerging generative AI systems. We sat down with our CEO, Justin Lane, to dive into data ethics, the trouble with big data, and the importance of building AI tools that address the issues.

<h2>Defining Data Ethics</h2>The ethical use of data, no? Sure, but what does that mean in practice? To get to the heart of it, we need to get more specific. Data ethics revolves around “not violating the trust and rights of other people in terms of how you're using data.”This includes:<ul><li>Not using data for purposes that the individual wouldn’t</li><li>Not using data for things that could potentially harm somebody else</li><li>Not using data to create an AI system that is solely tuned to doing something bad</li></ul>As simple as it seems, data is a billion-dollar business where right and wrong get murky quickly.

<h2>The Folly of Big Data</h2>“The fact is sometimes you don't need bigger data; you just need better algorithms.” Marketers have long relied on demographics like race, religion, sex, age, familial status, nationality, etc. to segment people. The case of Meta’s discriminatory housing ads is a textbook example of coupling those old-school marketing tactics with an almost blind overreliance on big data. As the<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-groundbreaking-settlement-agreement-meta-platforms-formerly-known" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </a><a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-groundbreaking-settlement-agreement-meta-platforms-formerly-known" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Department of Justice</a> noted, “the complaint alleges that Meta uses algorithms in determining which Facebook users receive housing ads, and that those algorithms rely, in part, on characteristics protected under the Fair Housing Act.” The thing is, it’s not actually the demographics that lead to and motivate buying decisions – it’s beliefs.

“Why would you want to segment that and just say, I'm not even going to talk to these people? When really you want to talk to everyone who would be interested. That's what's going to make your marketing most effective.”

<h2>New-School, Belief Based Marketing</h2>&nbsp;“You're not making products for a demographic; you're making products for people who need them and the demographics were just proxies for those people. With CulturePulse, we’re able to quantify people's beliefs, their values and the things that they're interested in.” If a person believes they should live a healthy lifestyle, for example, you should be able to focus your advertising of vitamins, supplements, exercise regimens, books, podcasts and whatnot to them specifically because they’re health conscious. Something that has nothing to do with their race, their income demographic, etc. – the belief transcends.“You can be more ethical by not incorporating that data.” <h2>Corporate Responsibility: The Status Quo vs. The People</h2>With great power comes great responsibility as they say. However, legacy companies like Meta, Twitter, etc., have made their billions trading our personal data. Remember, even if you’ve deleted your profile, in many cases they keep your data. “Now that there's this idea in mind of needing to pay people for their data, I think that that's why you're seeing a lot of activation in the legal space and you're going to see more lawsuits coming against the big guys around AI and data ethics in particular.” This dovetails with the Constitution and the 4th amendment – see what we mean about murky. “If we view our data as our property and therefore your security, then it means that someone can't take the data you produce and just sell it without your consent or your knowledge. Or you're being paid for it so you can agree to say a minuscule percent of Facebook’s profit.” And it’s not just about compensating individuals for the trillions of data points they’ve fed these companies over the years; AI models are being trained on the same data.<h2> </h2><h2>Corporation-on-Corporation Crime</h2>“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems</a>”, reads a recent headline from the New York Times. Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and more have been freely crawling and scraping Reddit data to build out their AI tools, creating massive value for themselves in the process without delivering any value back to Reddit – or the users who provided the data. [Note: CulturePulse pays Reddit for this same data.] Of course, users signed away their rights in the never-read terms of service, a classic case of what’s ethical and what’s legal not being quite aligned. <h2>What’s Next?</h2>That’s the big question that CulturePulse will be working towards answering as AI evolves. As Justin points out, “a lot of what I see in the startup community is people wanting to change things. They want to do it. They’re seeking ways to be more innovative in terms of their data ethics and more broadly ethical in terms of their innovations.” It’s less David vs. Goliath and more David feeding Goliath. Maybe the bigger question is, how much longer can that last? Justin spoke on setting ethical standards at the previous Reflect Festival; check out his thoughts:

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David vs. Goliath – Data Ethics and AI

CulturePulse gives us a better understanding of what drives our client’s audiences, what catches their eye, and what we can do to create the most engaging content for them.


<h2>Client: Undecided Agency</h2><a href="https://www.undecided.agency/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">Undecided Agency</a> is a full-service marketing firm solely focused on leveraging the power of <a href="https://www.reddit.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">Reddit</a> for its tech clients. <h2>Challenge: Misinformation and a lack of engaging counternarrative</h2>Unforeseen performance issues with a client’s new laptop charger were creating computer issues among a highly vocal group of users – gamers. The confusion and lack of official information created an unwanted negative buzz in many of the platform's large and very engaged gaming subreddits. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent;">r/gaminglaptops</a>, for example, has 173,000+ people in it and is in the top 1% of subreddits by size. Getting ahead of a trickle of bad news before it turned into a torrent was critical. <h2>Solution: Taking charge of a charged situation – owning the issue</h2>In order to address misinformation, improve information sharing, and stem the tide of negative sentiment, Undecided Agency took a proactive and transparent approach shaped by CulturePulse community insights. The strategy involved the following steps:<ol><li>Identification and acknowledgment: The company quickly identified the misinformation circulating on Reddit regarding their new laptop charger and acknowledged the concerns raised by users. They even thanked users for helping them find the root cause of the problem.</li><li>Detailed explanation: A&nbsp;<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/SlimQ/comments/14nooj4/psa_official_slimq_team_in_regards_of_slimq_330w/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">comprehensive post</a>&nbsp;was created, guided by CulturePulse audience analysis&nbsp;and posted to multiple subreddits, to explain why the issue occurred, including technical details about how the new charger affected computers.</li><li>Client support and engagement: The company shared information about how they assisted clients affected by the problematic charger, including replacement and repair options, and replied to Redditors.</li><li>Mitigation measures: The post detailed the steps to mitigate the issue, which involved recalling the faulty chargers and implementing firmware changes to prevent similar problems in the future.﻿</li></ol>﻿

CulturePulse helped us approach the problem in a way that doesn't break any of Reddit’s unspoken rules while maintaining respect for our community and not sounding overly corporate.

<h2>Result: Positive sentiment, higher engagement, and improved brand reputation</h2>The impact of Undecided’s approach was substantial:<ol><li>Community acceptance: The various Reddit communities responded positively to the transparent and detailed post, as well as the company's willingness to address, own, and resolve the issue.</li><li>Misinformation reduction: Providing accurate, audience-aligned information helped counteract the misinformation that had been circulating, leading to a reduction in misconceptions.</li><li>Improved brand reputation: Openly owning the problem ensured customers, old and new, were well-informed about potential issues; this transparency built trust and strengthened customer relationships.</li></ol>﻿

<ul><li>Brand evangelism: Enthusiastic customers, now armed with accurate information, became brand spokespeople, sharing and amplifying the message and increasing its reach.</li></ul>

<ul><li>Increased engagement: The post – shaped by CulturePulse analytics – resonated with the Reddit community, getting high engagement across subreddits and sparking discussions that elevated the company's credibility.</li></ul>

As<a href="https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/3/pgad018/7008465" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> </a><a href="https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/3/pgad018/7008465" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(17, 85, 204);">Oxford's study on fact-checked Reddit posts</a> notes, “posts eliciting comments that include fact-checks indicating the information is true tend to receive more engagement across a variety of metrics than do posts eliciting comments that include fact-checks indicating the information is false.” While not exactly a “fact-check”, this speaks to Redditor's relentless pursuit of the truth and the engagement that providing it can create.

Even though it was a negative experience for customers, complaints dropped quickly as our messaging began to hit the subreddits; people felt they were seen and taken care of.

<h2>Conclusion</h2>Based on CulturePulse's comprehensive understanding of subreddit preferences, concerns and communication style, Undecided was able to tailor the ideal content. Prioritizing community dynamics and setting itself apart from others. There’s immense reputational power in open and transparent communication, both when addressing misinformation and owning an issue. The right response can increase community engagement on social media platforms like Reddit for the better. By sharing detailed information and engaging with customers authentically, Undecided Agency effectively mitigated its client’s issue, fostered a positive relationship with their customers and maintained positive brand sentiment – setting them up for successful product launches in the future. <a href="https://app.culturepulse.ai/auth/register" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sign up</a> now and ensure your Reddit posts resonate with your audience!

Blog

CulturePulse: 2023 in Review

Beyond Sentiment: How CulturePulse Reshapes Audience Insights

David vs. Goliath – Data Ethics and AI

How CulturePulse helped a community manager stop misinformation from spreading on Reddit

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