BeHeard is a privately held startup specializing in non-linear analytics tools and dashboards. We are currently based out of Chennai, India.

Non-Linear Analytics refers to the techniques and metrics used to measure systems that cannot be expressed as a linear combination of its inherent components. While non-linear systems cover a wide range of topics in physics and mathematics, the area we are interested in as technologists and marketers is understanding Information Flows.

Anything we say or do reaches people, in far more ways than we imagine. Interpretation, amplification, modification and eventual attenuation create numerous paths and thought flows of the information you just shared with your secret keeper. Add the millions of thoughts, words and ideas that simultaneously affect us with a mixture of emotions. Consider the fact that the very act of talking about something we like often makes us like it even more. Now factor in such information flows across every individual, at every conceivable point of time. That’s about as non-linear as they come!

We provide a series of tools and dashboards to measure what information flows across social network conversations, who it influences, how much, and when.

Understanding customer engagement is increasingly being recognized as the true metric driving analytics. Measuring information flow and influence means looking beyond ‘who came’ and ‘who saw’ into ‘who genuinely cares’!

There used to be a popular ideology amongst marketers that ‘more traffic’ meant ‘more money’. To us, that makes about as much sense as doubling footfalls by bringing in the cows (cows in general have four legs, while humans have two. Do the math!).
Whether you are a business, freelancer, blogger or just about anybody, what you SHOULD be worrying about is engagement. Not to make you self conscious, but it really is about time you started worrying about what people are talking about you.

Of course we do. That was the first thing we ever did!
“If business were a race car, then analytics would be the speedometer. The speedometer spins when the car moves, not the other way!”
Analytics as we know it today is heading towards the speedometer that is viewed without considering the car. Increasing the hit rate without understanding customer engagement is futile, and downright wrong- to both the customer and to analytics itself!
We believe we are here to revive the romance in marketing. We are here to end the evil manipulation of traditional linear analytics. We are here to bring back to the world the joys of ‘Engagement’. We are here to spread the information about information spread.
We are here to change the world!

As the story goes, Vikram had been working on information flow for quite some time. Specifically, he was working on a model to understand how the details of his bad hair cut had jumped through three states, steered halfway across the globe and back before he even got out of the sytlists’. Shyam loved the basic idea behind this and proposed extending it to social networks. Sundar jumped on as the concept metamorphosed into a beautiful non-linear mathematical system, and we came out with our prototype.