Great for PR and media monitoring, while still being intuitive enough for day‑to‑day use. The platform makes it easy to track brand, campaign and issue‑based conversations across news and social and quickly turn that data into insights that are genuinely useful for reporting, pitches and client updates. The filtering and visualisation tools are particularly strong - being able to quickly isolate relevant coverage (e.g. news only, specific geographies or time periods) saves a huge amount of time. Customer support is another major plus. The Pulsar team are knowledgeable, responsive and proactive and are very good at helping refine searches or sense‑check outputs to ensure the data is accurate and meaningful.

I like starting from the list of content identified as relevant to us and then diving into people’s spontaneous conversations. This can be done easily from the dashboard within each topic search. While the process is time-consuming, it would be almost impossible without Pulsar filtering and surfacing the relevant content for us. This relies on carefully refining the Boolean logic behind each topic search - something the Pulsar team were excellent at helping us develop, test and visualise. Recent developments, such as the ability to organise topic searches into folders and AI-generated topic summaries, have also been very helpful. We are lucky to have access to Narratives AI and have enjoyed using it to brainstorm topics for a range of campaigns and events. It has helped us explore ideas and angles we might not otherwise have considered. The application is also very user-friendly, which meant we were able to train colleagues in other teams to use it independently. To expand on the topic of training, from onboarding onwards Pulsar have been very generous with their time, and flexible in adjusting to our shifting priorities and timelines. We have regular fortnightly catch-ups, and the team are always available to support ad hoc requests or arrange presentations and workshops for the wider team. I also find the weekly Power Ups (e.g. case studies or deep dives into useful content) particularly valuable and relevant as a form of CPD.

Although it takes a while to get things set up, once you have a robust search you can use dashboards to filter responses and gather quick insights. Once you're confident each part of a dashboard is correct (the search, the filter, the segment etc.), the insight can be applied in lots of ways. Having filters set up in dashboards has made it easy to get quick insight upon request and sped up reporting for several disparate campaigns. The new evolution of AI 'themes' from 'topics' is great to use with senior stakeholders and applies a lens of exploration that would be quite hard to intuit or define as an individual. The ability to export large amounts of the feed is certainly beneficial and the standard export comes with many of the fields used to create the graphics in the search - which allows me to reproduce what I'm seeing before conducting further investigation. The Pulsar team are highly engaged and easy to get hold of - where it's easy to ask for help or bounce ideas. They're always willing to come in and offer training and the regular power-up sessions are really engaging even when they're not about a related industry.