MotivBase Trends is not a social media monitoring tool.
It is a tool that helps you perform on-demand ethnographic research with big data. That is, it helps you decode the hidden meanings behind topics and trends in consumer culture. To achieve this, MotivBase crunches through a minimum of 10 million consumer conversations each month. But, it does not store those conversations.
Rather, MotivBase stores the topics resulting from consumer conversations, and of course, the nature of relationships between them (volume, frequency, semantic distance, etc.) This is what we call a "topic database".
This is the key to MotivBase's ability to study consumer culture, because culture is the meanings we associate with the “things in our lives”, which is easily rendered as a combination of topics with varying degrees of relationships between them. Studying it requires us to go much beyond direct mentions of a topic to also examine the universe of related topics multiple degrees of separation away. Using a vector database, MotivBase is able to go deep into the culture behind a topic within a timeframe.
Of course, a by-product of this method is that MotivBase does not deliver any consumer quotes/visuals, etc. And a nice side-effect of that is that MotivBase does not have to worry about the storage and dissemination of consumer (personally identifiable) data.
This makes MotivBase one of the first social data analysis tools to become GDPR-compliant.