A thread that’s turning on you.
The town posted the new downtown parking bylaw on Friday afternoon. It is Sunday night and the post has 140 comments. Three residents are writing most of them, a councillor has been named twice, and nobody from the town has replied to anything. The answer is due before the office opens: do we respond?
Every tool you have counts what was already said. The question on the table is what happens next — and whether your reply is the thing that makes it bigger.
140 comments, and no reply.
The town has about 9,000 residents and one communications lead, who also writes the newsletter and lays out the recreation guide. On Friday afternoon the town announced the new downtown parking bylaw: two-hour limits on the main street, resident permits on three side streets, in effect the first of next month. The local paper covered it online within the hour. By Sunday evening the comment thread under the story has 140 comments, and nobody in the office can say whether that number is still climbing.
Three residents are writing most of them. One owns a shop on the main street and has posted eleven times. A councillor has been named twice, once alongside a claim about the vote that is not accurate. Nothing from the town has been posted in reply. The chief administrator has forwarded the thread twice with the same question attached, and it has to be answered tonight: do we respond, and does responding make it worse?
What listening usually gets you.
Monitoring, a digest, and a guess.
A social listening tool counts and classifies the comments that already exist and sends a morning digest. Somebody reads it, forms a view, and the town finds out whether replying helps by replying. The vendors describe their own category the same way: monitoring and listening both work on conversation that has already been posted.
Both answers tested, before Monday.
Paste the link and one sentence about what you have to decide. Pulse reads the live page as a visitor would — never posting, never logging in — stamps when it read it, finds the other places the same conversation is happening, plays it forward, and runs stay out and step in as two arms on the same conversation. Then it re-reads on the cadence you choose and marks its earlier projections right or wrong.
Published industry estimates: listening tiers from Sprout Social, Brand24 and Hootsuite’s own pricing pages. Brandwatch and Meltwater publish no subscription price, and both define the category as monitoring conversation that already exists. Every figure and its source is on Compare.
A link and one sentence in. A reading out.
The same scenario, as Pulse would receive it. This example is illustrative — the report shape is real, and the call is written the way Pulse writes one.
A town's parking bylaw, and the thread under it
A link to the local paper's story on the new downtown parking bylaw — 140 comments in two days, three residents doing most of the talking, a councillor named twice, and no reply from the town yet. “Do we respond, and does responding make it worse?”
A Pulse Decision Report — and the re-reads that follow
Stay out for now. The thread is plateauing on its own: three of the four arguments gaining ground are about the bylaw's timing, not its substance, and the two voices carrying it have drawn no new participants in a day and a half. A reply from the town re-opens it. If the named councillor is drawn in, step in within the day with a facts-only correction — a reply we tested separately, against staying out.
- The Call
- What We're Reading
- Where This Conversation Lives
- Where It's Heading
- What's Gaining Ground
- Who's Carrying It
- If You Step In
- What Changed Since the Last Reading
- Evidence & Confidence
- Your Original Input
What the communications lead knows before the office opens.
Written for the person deciding whether to reply — the call first, then everything it rests on.
- Whether it is still growingComments per hour, not comments in total. A thread of 140 that stopped moving on Saturday afternoon is a different problem from one that did not.
- Which of the three voices actually carriesVolume is not reach. You get who is being replied to and shared, as distinct from who is simply posting the most.
- Where else this conversation livesPulse looks for the same argument in the places you did not name — the local news comments, a regional subreddit, a residents’ group — and lists the venues it found but could not read.
- What is gaining groundThe arguments winning, in the participants’ own words. Whether the fight is about the two-hour limit or about how the vote happened decides what a reply would even be.
- What a reply changes, and what silence costsStepping in runs as its own arm against staying out. You get what each does to the thread, and the tripwire that should change your answer — the named councillor drawn in, a second venue picking it up.
- Citations to words that are really thereEvery finding points at a comment on the page, time-stamped, with the reviewers’ disagreements printed rather than averaged and a confidence reading that can only be lowered.
Faster and cheaper. And different in kind.
Quality
A listening tool tells you what has been said and in what tone. A reading tells you where it is heading, who is carrying it, and what a reply would do — built from the people in the thread, argued over by a named panel of AI reviewers that includes one seat whose whole job is to make the case for staying out, and cited back to comments that exist.
Speed
Continuous monitoring still ends with somebody guessing on Monday. A reading takes about a minute from pasting the link, and can be run again the moment the thread moves.
Cost
A listening subscription runs US$99–699 a month before anyone has read this particular thread, and published enterprise tiers start at US$1,499 a month. A Pulse reading is one credit, and the reading is the deliverable.
Figures as above, from Sprout Social, Brand24 and Hootsuite’s published pricing. Sources on Compare.
The reading keeps going.
Pulse re-reads the conversation on the cadence you choose — hourly while it matters, daily once it does not. The next report opens with what changed since the last reading: new participants, new venues, arguments that grew and arguments that died. Then it scores the previous reading’s dated projections, right or wrong, and keeps that score whether it flatters the system or not.
If you did step in, the follow-up questions the report generated for itself — was the correction picked up?, was the councillor drawn in? — come back to you as plain questions, and your answers build the record.
Read it in the app, publish it to your own branded portal, download the PDF, share it by secure link, or listen to the audio briefing before the Monday meeting.
Four steps. Minutes, not a morning.
Tell it what's going on
A few sentences in your own words, a draft if you have one, a link if the conversation is already out there. A short guided conversation fills in the rest — mostly by clicking.
PRISM builds your audience
A simulated population built from your stakeholders — customers, employees, residents, journalists, regulators — including the real public bodies your situation pulls in.
They react. Then it's argued.
The audience reacts to the actual material. A named panel of AI reviewers argues about what the reactions mean, and a reviewer whose job is to break the draft attacks the conclusion.
You get the Decision Report
The call, the evidence, the disagreements, what would change the call, and an honest confidence reading. Read it, share it from your own portal, download it, or listen to it.
Live from the catalog — what the app charges today.
Every name, description and price below is read from the same catalog the app bills from, at the moment you load this page. Change a product in the back office and this page changes with it.