April 13, 2022
What Makes Citibeats Unique: Social Understanding vs. Social Listening

To positively impact society, organizations must fully understand the issues, concerns, and questions populations face.
Through social understanding tools, such as those deployed by Citibeats, organizations can have full visibility into evolving conversations about important issues, discover actionable societal insights, and ultimately, enact needed change.
Social understanding platforms utilize a multitude of cutting-edge technologies to detect early warning signs, locate anomalies, ethically mitigate bias, and much more.
Compared to social listening, which has marketing-oriented motivations, social understanding tools are ethically motivated and contextualize digital conversations, providing decision-makers with actionable insights so they can fundamentally improve people’s lives.
Citibeats Social Understanding vs. Social Listening Platforms
Social understanding platforms such as Citibeats are people oriented, geared toward interpreting real-time social changes, conversations, and public opinions with a purpose of positively impacting society. Social listening tools, by contrast, are branding motivated, digesting opinions via social media channels with the commercial purpose of optimizing digital marketing strategies.
While social listening tools analyze digital conversations, social understanding tools interpret micro- and macro-narratives and public opinions in real time.
From overall strategy to structure and intent, several aspects set social understanding platforms such as Citibeats apart from social listening offerings.
Social |
Citibeats |
|
Purpose |
Branding oriented |
People oriented |
Focus |
Company needs |
Society needs |
Approach |
Marketing approach: Listen to opinions for a commercial purpose |
Social approach: Understand social changes for an ethical purpose |
Detectors |
Sentiment detectors |
Multilingual intent detectors |
What do they monitor? |
Keywords |
Micro and macro narratives based on content in real time |
Do they mitigate bias? |
No |
Yes |
Categories |
Keyword-related categories with manual cleaning and updates to be able to follow the rapidly evolving online conversations. |
Self-learning categories |
Social indexes |
No social indexes |
Customize social indexes (inflation, innovation for productivity, polarization, etc.) |
Findings |
Descriptive statistics |
Anomalies |
Reporting |
Quantitative reporting |
Interactive report creation inside the platform (private and safe) |
Evolving learning |
No learning over time |
Evolving learning from a few seed words |
Multilingual Intent Detectors
Citibeats utilizes natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to field large quantities of unstructured data to better understand complex societal issues. The language-agnostic platform collects and structures citizens’ views and opinions transforming them into actionable insights, also including the voices of those segments of the population often ignored by traditional research methods.
While social listening tools use sentiment detectors to interpret text, Citibeats’ multilingual intent detectors provide structure based on context, not only keywords, to monitor real-time micro-narratives.
Ethically Minded Bias Mitigation
By analyzing aggregated, anonymized data, Citibeats’ artificial intelligence (AI) technology is ethical in nature, seeks to mitigate bias, and utilized solely for positive societal impact. Social listening tools analyze social media commentary and more to inform marketers about brand opinion and strategy.
Using social understanding platforms, private and public organizations can analyze conversations about pressing social issues, from sustainability to social risk.
Detects Early Warning Signs, Quickly
Aimed at proactively detecting early warning signs, our Sustainability and Social Risk Monitors have been meticulously crafted in collaboration with skilled field experts, and from our past four years of experience helping large organizations and governments make better decisions.
While some AI tech companies may employ large-scale technology, these likewise typically demand ample investments of resources, including time and money, to create projects. However, Citibeats enables access to the platform in minutes, delivering language-agnostic analyses across various geographical regions, and empowering clients with actionable insights in an efficient, cost-effective manner.
Self-Learning Categories
Self-learning technology is another unique characteristic making social understanding platforms such as Citibeats unique.
To keep up with the myriad rapidly evolving conversations online, social listening software demands manual updates to keyword-related categories. To provide organizations and governments with actionable and up-to-date information, Citibeats does so intelligently, through self-learning technology. As more information is provided to its algorithm, Citibeats learns new relationships and patterns associated with defined categories, empowering organizations with improved, more precise results, every day.
Customizable Social Indexes
In addition to honing in on varying clusters of a population, Citibeats also enables users to customize social indexes such as inflation, discomfort, or polarization to gauge real-time data organizations can leverage to address quality of life issues.
Given its marketing intent, a typical social listening platform is not capable of customizing these indexes.
Interactive Reports That Find Anomalies
In contrast with social listening quantitative reports detailing descriptive statistics, Citibeats seeks to find anomalies, and creates interactive, accessible reports inside the platform to safeguard privacy and safety.
Evolutive Learning From a Few Seed Words
When a social understanding tool processes the meaning of a term, it begins by associating the word with a few, basic seed words. After this initial learning, the technology can intelligently evolve to automatically make more associations between other related words.
For example, when learning the term “mobility,” we program related seed words such as “truck,” “car,” and “train.” Automatic machine learning tools then independently build relationships between other terms, and the technology begins associating additional words with “mobility,” such as “lorry,” “electric vehicle,” “transportation,” “flights,” “airplane,” “station,” “airport,” and hundreds more.
The Advantages of the Citibeats Platform
Compared to traditional research methods such as surveys or focus groups, Citibeats’ unique social understanding technology delivers unparalleled, real-time analyses, aimed at reducing biases and creating better results.
Ethically Mitigating Biases
A platform built around citizens for citizens, Citibeats’ goal is to provide clients with a comprehensive representation of the population, with minimized gender-based biases—among others—enabling calibrated research results that are more ethical, accurate, and focused on diversity and inclusion.
Through analyzing varying regions, you can listen to more diverse opinions, creating more inclusive and populationally representative models compared to traditional surveys that tend to be more geographically limited.
Citibeats’ language-agnostic technology is all inclusive, recognizing voices and languages frequently ignored or excluded from traditional methods. Our algorithms are designed to mitigate—and hopefully, eliminate—gender-based biases, through capabilities that detect and minimize them.
Actionable Insights, 90 Days Faster
Citibeats also delivers actionable insights 90 days faster than traditional methods, empowering clients to respond to real-time conversations and positively impact their communities.
This cutting-edge AI technology is a welcome alternative to relying on time-consuming, limited results of traditional surveys or focus groups that too often recommend social changes when it is already too late. By detecting the prevalence of given conversations, the Citibeats platform alerts about topic fluctuations so decision-makers can proactively detect and mitigate risks before they negatively impact communities.
Organizations can assess populations’ most pressing concerns through daily conversation analysis, in contrast with the traditional method of asking questions and creating inherent bias. This bottom-up approach reveals insights into issues populations are discussing regarding demonstrations, complaints, starvation, and so much more. Our platform enables generation of interactive, private reports, safeguarded within the monitor, and sharebale within the monitor, and sherable with selected team members.
Markedly quicker than conventional methods, Citibeats’ technology fundamentally works for you, requiring less time and resources in seamlessly gathering data from continually evolving societal situations, so you can make the best decisions for your community’s unique needs.
The Citibeats platform leverages ethical AI for social understanding, collecting and analyzing real-time data from social media, blog posts, comments, forums, and much more. Our Sustainability and Social Risk Monitors uncover millions of unfolding conversations in real time, enabling organizations to contextualize changes and gather actionable insights.
Schedule a demo today to learn more.