As part of NewsWhip’s inclusion in the Social Intelligence Lab Tech Landscape report, our CPO Dervilla Mullan sat down with their team to discuss how NewsWhip helps brands proactively defend their reputations with predictive data. This interview first appeared in SILab Tech Landscape report which you can find here.
NewsWhip’s predictive media monitoring platform helps comms and insights professionals proactively manage their brand’s reputation. They do this by providing a live, quantified view of what’s happening across all digital, web and social media so that users can understand what’s happening that’s relevant to their brand and, more importantly, how it’s likely to evolve next.
And, like their platform, NewsWhip are thinking ahead with their development plans over the next 12 to 18 months and beyond. According to their Chief Product Officer, Dervilla Mullan, NewsWhip’s roadmap for the short-term focuses on three important use cases for their customers: managing live issues that have a reputational impact, understanding wider trends and their broader context, and finding ways to get this information to the wider audience.
As Dervilla explains, “they want NewsWhip to help them scale the distribution of those tailored insights by getting them directly to different teams who can use them, whether it’s C-suite or marketing and comms teams.”
Protecting brand reputation with a 360° view
So how does this translate into product development? Firstly, they’re going to be developing their social timeline which will give a multi-network, 360° view of how conversations develop across the internet. So many people are now using social media as their main source of news and information, which means some of the most damaging stories for brand reputation can start here and spread much more quickly than on traditional news sites.
As Dervilla explains, “an issue might start on Reddit, generate a lot of posts there, and then get propagated on to coverage by publishers on the web. But then it gets distributed more widely on Twitter. Other content might fit better with Instagram or TikTok, so the real public interest will start here.” By bringing in this wider context, the social timeline feature will help identify stories that could be a risk to brands, regardless of where they start, and make it easier for brands to see around corners and predict how they might evolve.
Making generative AI more reliable
Another key area that NewsWhip are focusing on is embedding AI. It’s impossible to ignore this trend across the SITech space because of its potential benefits. For example in summarizing extracting meaning from the massive amounts of social data that’s available.
NewsWhip have already integrated some elements of AI into their platform, but the next stage will be to use it to answer key questions automatically for their customers. As Dervilla highlights, “We know the types of questions they’re asking. How significant is this issue? Where is it spreading? What are the big themes that are driving this narrative? Increasingly we’ll use AI as an agent for users, to assist them in getting those answers automatically.” To develop these features they’re looking to build partnerships with different AI providers from big names like OpenAI and Anthropic, to smaller ones that can help them build it in-house.
However, we all know how unreliable generative AI can be, so NewsWhip are planning to enrich and quantify their data to make sure users can trust it. According to Dervilla, “we score actual engagement with every single article and post, and run a lot of metrics and analysis. We think by coupling AI insight with the rigor of quantifying data, we can give more reliable insights than if you’re just asking certain models to extract what they see as the important themes, which might not always be the case…we will always link AI-generated results back to the underlying data so that you can see where an insight came from.” This combination of AI with real, tangible data will give users a fuller picture which they can use to predict the future of a trend, story, or live issue at a glance.
Giving more people the bigger picture on online trends
When it comes to helping teams distribute insights across their organizations, they’re looking to improve the summaries that they offer to make them easier for anyone without a data analytics background to understand. They’re also offering “view only” access, to ensure the data and insights can be only configured and managed by experts, but still be used by everyone.
The main benefit to these new features is that users will be able to see the bigger picture of online trends and conversations about them more easily, and as a result predict potential outcomes more quickly. According to Dervilla, “I think that the combination of a complete picture of real-time web and social in a timeline with helping users ‘see around corners’ to a bigger degree will be quite groundbreaking.”
