Helixa Discovery, from Helixa in New York, is the company's core analytics engine that equips users with the tools to understand what’s distinctive about any audience and what they care about.
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Pulsar RESEARCH
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Pulsar RESEARCH, from Pulsar headquartered in London, includes continuous and one-off research programs integrating quantitative and qualitative methodologies, to turn audience data into strategic insight.
Users have to be upfront with clients on where Helixa is pulling data from or they could get the wrong idea about the insights. Helixa pulls from a number of sources to gain insight but may not specifically be from the owned channel social audience. By using total social view, you can potentially get the audience data for your Twitter channel which can add specificity to your insights but they can differ from the overall consumer audience. Helixa is best used as a starting point, a place to get ideas and pull supporting data to understand patterns in behavior about an audience. I would not necessarily take its word as gospel, just one piece of a larger insight. My favorite section are the opinions as they show what is most important to the specific audience and can really help get the wheels turning. My least favorite section are the influencer categories. From my experience with Helixa, the influencers tend to skew political and mainstream which is not necessarily what clients are looking for when trying to understand what kind of people are influencing audiences. I also mind that Helixa pulls in a lot of unnecessary social apps like Flickr or Foursquare which are hardly used anymore.
Pulsar is well suited for delivering social listening campaign insights and reporting over a longer period of time. The information and report we create are great... eventually, but it takes a long time to feel like they have gathered enough content that we can readily use. If they were able to speed up the delivery of the data and insights that would be incredibly helpful for our teams in many instances where we have a short runway to providing insights for our clients.
Pulsar is awesome. However it would be great if they were able to pull data and insights across a few other social platforms that we know our targets are using.
Having easily accessible "Hot To" videos on platform use would have definitely helped us get off the ground faster.
They should do away with the need to have to use boolean information in order to access deeper dives into searches.
Helixa is just a completely different beast entirely. Where other consumer research boils down their insights into reports, Helixa allows you to go through audience data with a fine tooth comb, also providing the opportunity for direct comparison across different brands or demographic groups. While we did pick Helixa, I can’t emphasize the need for making Helixa one tool in a tool box. While Mintel was a tool we considered that was similar-ish, we also use Mintel now to help complement Helixas insights
Pulsar does an excellent job standing up to and standing out from their competition. The thing that attracted us to the platform is its ongoing platform updates and improvements. A lot of SAS platforms get people to sign up and then they don't continue to refine their platform. They don't stay ahead of the curve in delivering leading-edge solutions. Pulsar has continued to modify and expand its solutions. That's really important - especially when you are recommending platform investments for your company... that last thing you want is to talk something up and then it doesn't deliver. Pulsar definitely has delivered.
