Shooglebox AI for PR teams – digging deeper into the online conversations shaping opinions and culture
Shooglebox AI is being used by some of the UK’s top PR and corporate communications teams to transform the way they gather, explore and understand the things people are saying and doing on social media and interest-based platforms like TikTok and Reddit.
Think of it as a superpowered assistant for your PR team – capable of working through huge volumes of posts, comments and conversations, spotting patterns and helping you turn them into clear, usable insight.
It does this by tackling problems most teams have already run into.
Why it’s such a big opportunity and why it's hard
Platforms like TikTok and Reddit are increasingly the kinds of places where people find their information and entertainment, encounter ideas, form their opinions and share them with others.
They collapse creation, distribution and reaction into one loop to accelerate the way cultural trends or reputational issues take shape and spread.
They’re where early signals appear – often in small, fragmented ways before they become visible more widely.
And the most useful signals and insights are not just in the posts themselves. They’re often in the reaction around them – the comments, replies, jokes and disagreements that show what different groups of people really think.
The opportunity to see and explore all this conversation in such incredible detail is a game-changer for PR teams.
But that conversation is vast, fragmented and hard to capture.
The gap between what’s happening and what you can actually see
There’s no shortage of social media listening tools and platforms promising to capture these conversations and analyse them for themes and sentiment but brands’ PR and insights directors learned long ago that the results they actually deliver are of limited practical use.
The reality is that the vast majority of content and conversation across Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and other social platforms is inaccessible to the social listening tools, despite their marketing teams' attempts to rebrand them as social intelligence or narrative intelligence platforms. It means their outputs are based on a very incomplete picture, skewed towards what is more easily available on platforms like X.
The risk is that teams default to surface-level observation, unreliable summaries based on limited data, or anecdotal evidence, rather than a structured understanding of what is actually happening.
Why native AI tools can’t close that gap
Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are excellent at analysing, structuring and synthesising huge amounts of information.
But they can only work with what they can see.
They too don’t have direct access to the bulk of content and comments on social media – and even where they can access fragments, they lack the surrounding context that gives those fragments meaning unless they can fall back on any news articles or other publicly available online content talking about it.
That’s why asking an AI “what are people saying?” often produces something that feels plausible but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Feeding the AI properly
Shooglebox AI provides tools and techniques to help bridge that gap.
It gives PR teams a way to quickly gather the material that matters – posts, comments, video transcripts, image descriptions and links – and bring it together in one place with the context intact.
This is the critical step.
Instead of relying on AI to infer what people might be saying from incomplete, uncontexualised data you are feeding it with the actual posts and conversations in full with all the nuance and texture that comes with them.
That shift – from prompting AI for quick answers to feeding AI for rapid analysis – is what unlocks the real value.
It means the AI can work directly with the same material you would want to use yourself but at a scale and incredible speed that would be impossible to match manually.
What Shooglebox AI helps you do
When Shooglebox is used to gather posts from across any social or online platform they are turned into cards with embeds on the back. One of the biggest innovations in Shooglebox AI is the ability to enhance card backs by capturing lots more material from the posts including:
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Video transcription – Word-for-word transcripts of what people are saying in their videos, with language translation if necessary
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Themed comments – Pulling in comments with the option for AI to have a first pass at selecting the most useful or relevant and sorting them into themes
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Image description – Analysing what pictures show and turning captions and overlays into editable text
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Profile info – Details on the poster including bio, account links, follower and engagement statistics
Fed with all this rich material, Shooglebox AI can now get to work analysing it to find and surface recurring themes and patterns, highlight differences in how different audiences are reacting across platforms, and pull together summaries that help a human team discover surprises and insights for further exploration.
What would take hours of manual trawling and note-taking can be analysed in depth in minutes. It’s like having a super-efficient research assistant who constantly presents you with insightful results you can explore, challenge and build on.
Built to support skilled PR professionals
The judgment still sits with the experienced PR professional – deciding what matters, what it means and what to say and do about it. The difference is that those decisions are based on a deeper understanding of the conversation.
Instead of asking AI for quick answers based on imperfect data sources, you are giving it the material it needs to quickly help you find much better answers.
Example: What people are saying about latest menu changes at McDonald’s
You can see an example of just how useful this is in this blog post about reaction across social media to McDonald’s finally bringing the American breakfast favourite the McGriddle to the UK. McDonald’s regularly refresh their menus throughout the year – so there’s a constant stream of new talking points around the brand on social media as thousands of people review and tell others about the new items.
Shooglebox AI does in a couple of minutes what would take a human researcher or analyst several hours. The theming of thousands of comments on a popular post can be done in seconds – and hundreds of posts can be analysed simultaneously.
The AI models are trained using a carefully defined set of instructions that outline what high-quality, relevant comments look like across different types of conversation topics, optimising selection towards the highest-value comments. AI guardrails ensure comments are quoted verbatim, preserving wording, tone and emojis exactly as written and preventing the tendency of AI to hallucinate.