Gaining meaningful insights into consumer sentiment remains a longstanding challenge for brands, especially as traditional methods such as influencer marketing and paid research often provide only limited and curated perspectives. However, a Ukrainian startup named buzzabout is making significant strides in this domain with its innovative AI tool designed to extract real-time insights from the vast ocean of social media discussions.
Founded by Surkov, who has a comprehensive background in various tech-related ventures since his university days, buzzabout's tool analyses key opinions stemming from billions of conversations across popular platforms like Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube. This approach enables marketers to make more informed, data-driven decisions based on authentic consumer sentiments.
Surkov’s journey into the tech world began with a startup aimed at developing a device for detecting motorcycle accidents, followed by a prominent role as head of marketing at IT Cluster, where he contributed to initiatives in IT education and partnerships between educational institutions and the corporate sector. After a tenure as Product Owner of an AI-powered marketing tool called Advisus, he launched the digital marketing agency Plann Ads, which he ran for five years prior to establishing buzzabout.
The core capability of buzzabout is its ability to capture insights from social media that reflect genuine user experiences and sentiments. According to Surkov, the challenge in today’s landscape is that capturing attention on social media requires a nuanced understanding of the target audience, a clarity that many brands lack. This gap often results in low return on investment (ROI), client dissatisfaction, and elevated customer churn rates. "Consequently, we lack the necessary audience data to make informed strategic decisions," Surkov states. As a result, many marketers resort to unreliable secondary data, competitor analyses, and costly A/B testing to devise effective approaches, which he describes as both inefficient and expensive.
buzzabout aims to shift the paradigm by helping brands understand their audience’s genuine needs as articulated in online conversations. Surkov provides an example involving a client selling electric bikes who believed their marketing should focus on the bike's colour and battery life. However, buzzabout’s analysis revealed consumers were more concerned with practical issues like carrying the bikes upstairs and the associated social stigma. This pivotal information allowed the client’s team to tailor their campaigns more effectively, addressing real pain points rather than perceived strengths.
Unique to buzzabout is its data capture mechanism, which intelligently processes information to extract targeted insights, unlike traditional methods that indiscriminately gather data. Surkov explains that the company focuses on building threads that connect related posts and comments on platforms such as Reddit, leading to a richer analysis of underlying ideas and trends. This method enables businesses, especially smaller ones, to glean insights that may have been open to them but otherwise remained inaccessible.
The user experience of the buzzabout tool is notably straightforward. During a trial using the search term “fintech startups” on Reddit, valuable insights were generated, showcasing the tool’s potential. The company is currently looking to expand its analysis capabilities to additional platforms such as Instagram, indicating ambition and foresight.
Despite being early in its development, with Surkov expressing the ongoing search for a sustainable business model and precise product-market fit, buzzabout holds promise not only for marketers but also for corporations, researchers, and journalists seeking to harness social intelligence for informed decision-making in an ever-evolving marketplace.
Source: Noah Wire Services