Eureka aims to be an inspiration dashboard not a monitoring tool

Although Circus Eureka has features that resemble a social media monitoring tool, the company has been clear on differentiating it as an insights tool to help users “build ideas and collaborate.”

“There are many good social monitoring tools already on the market, but Eureka is focusing on a gap that allows users to turn these insights into ideas and content instead,” said Prerna Pant, general manager at Circus. 

The inspiration for Eureka came about as a result of a lack of ideas during a client pitch. "We’d go into meetings with clients and talk about coming up with a clear content strategy after analyzing competitors, the landscape and trends among a host of other considerations," said Shalu Wasu, the company's MD. "At some point, someone said ‘Isn’t there an app for that?’ and we laughed, but when we got back to work, we thought, why not?”        

Circus claims the marketing tool allows clients to:

• Monitor trends
• Identify influencers
• Collect insights systematically
• Analyse topics
• Save inspiration for ideas

After launching in early October, the company has had UPS and Millennial Hotels and Resorts as clients. Pant said that the company is also in the early stages of working with a number of agencies. Based on feedback Circus is developing a second version of Eureka that will include a feature called ‘Sparks’, a function that will allow clients to “write, save and share idea notes linking to inspiration from the web.” This version will be launched towards the end of the year.

“Many clients are asking about custom options, and we just did a China version for a client that will work for all local platforms and media there,” said Pant, who also mentioned a custom job for Intel that combines more traditional social monitoring functions with Eureka’s inspiration-board and idea-generation focus.

According to Pant, the company’s setup cost is typically higher than most social-media monitoring services. Eureka’s one-off set up cost is S$8000 with a monthly fee of S$3500, which includes the licensing fee, data fee and analyst fee. “Agencies or clients that already have analysts can use their own, in which case we won’t charge for the analyst.”

Pant stresses the importance of “inputting sources and data inputs relevant to the brand” and recommends plugging in at least “600 sources” with the help of expert analysts.

“Coca-Cola for example is about happiness, so ideally you want to get inspiration about what’s trending and what is making people happy as well as how and why because this could potentially be the seed of a story, campaign or innovation," Pant said. "You want to go beyond the bubble of what people are saying about your brand and gather real and fresh inspiration.”

The company claims that Eureka is a source-agnostic platform that works with company data, APIs and a host of widgets. Circus also works with data providers such as Digimind and DataSift to deliver insights.