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Streetbees is one of those tools you wish you’d come up with says SHOOK’s Gemma Moroney

Streetbees is one of those tools you wish you’d come up with – like Wonder, the gig economy for academics. It is billed as ‘the world’s first real-time global consumer insights platform’ and it uses real people on the ground + machine learning to assess moods, sentiment and predict trends.

It was recommended to us by one of our favourite former clients and since then addiction to its Mood of the World map has set in.

A year ago today, the UK’s mood was content/upbeat. As I type it’s ‘fine’ (we all know how pass-agg that phrase is for Brits…), although that’s an improvement on March when we were – obviously – predominately ‘anxious/stressed’.

Particularly given the need for brands to be sensitive to the changing mood of their audiences right now, this is a useful tool for those planning country specific as well as global campaigns. For example – Spain’s mood is currently aligned to the UK’s, but both are quite different to the rest of Europe. The world’s overall sentiment is more negative than positive but some countries such as the UK, Canada, France and the Russian Federation feel more positive than negative. Potentially helpful stuff when looking at messaging and creative.

Streetbees has had serious investment from the likes of Octopus, LocalGlobe and BGF and is seriously worth a look – it goes way beyond just Mood of the World.

Pros

  1. Simple, easy to use
  2. Fantastic content available, including brilliant register-to-watch webinars on different sectors
  3. Lots of different ways to use the full version, for bespoke research
  4. A range of different methods, from analysing conversation, to real-time ethnography to looks at attitudes and rituals

Cons

  1. Mood of the World (at least the free version) does not cover all the countries in the world. I’d have loved, for example, to be able to compare New Zealand to the UK, but there isn’t data available. There also seem to be a large number of African countries missing. Overall, covers 87 countries – fewer than half of the total
  2. May not capture a true picture of sentiment. For example, it’s reported there are around 9 milllion lonely people in the UK (13-14%) but only 1% report lonely mood on Streetbees
  3. Lots of fantastic free content – needs consideration for the investment otherwise.

Written by Gemma Moloney, co-founder of communications agency SHOOK

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