How SOCIAL LISTENING can improve your business
I am old enough to remember when listening was, by itself, a social function – it was simply engaging with others; it has now come to mean something more and, something that can be quite insidious.
It was recently revealed that the NZ government had, through an agency, paid a large amount to ‘listen’ to NZers opinion of the Covid-19 response. This is not an unreasonable thing to do. As a citizen I am interested in being heard but it feels somewhat underhand when we find out it was done without our permission.
At this point, it’s important to sit down with a good strong cuppa and critically think about what is happening with our social data. Everything that we ‘put out’ in public fora is public. This means that other people can view it, can judge us for our opinion, and can usually comment. If we have shared it publicly we cannot expect people to come and ask our permission to read or to be influenced by what we have posted.
If we aggregate all of these shared posts and then start to analyse them for trends – perhaps how the sentiment towards a product or issue has changed over time; then the data become, collectively, more valuable. The data are able to provide us with insights that we might not have achieved elsewhere.
There are rules and regulations around data use and we expect that our government agencies will be operating well within these. For example, a good litmus test could be would the data that are used withstand scrutiny via an Official Information Act request or live up to the requirements of the NZ Privacy Law. I personally believe that alongside these legal requirements there are even more compelling ethical considerations.
We use social data and are proud to say that our methods meet (and exceed) all legal and ethical frameworks. That is still not enough for us, however, we believe that big data can be used for good. We developed our datascience tools from a position of wanting to improve food systems and we rapidly learned that the methods we had developed were equally applicable to other sectors such as tourism. We were watching changes in sentiment towards the Government’s Covid response with interest and could see how it could influence public policy. We have also looked at the recent occupation and protests in Wellington and how sentiment towards Police shifted over time. These are interesting and useful insights.
Handled sensitively, within an explicit ethical and legal framework, and provided in a timely way, these insights can help private and public sectoragencies respond quickly and decisively. We are interested in helping. If you are interested in learning more then get in touch.
