Monitoring opinions to make decisions

The programme Solidaris from Catalunya Ràdio interviewed us to talk about how the monitoring of users' opinions on social media is used by both companies and political parties. You can listen to Mònica Roca's report here (CAT):

What we explained in this short report is that more and more entities are listening to the opinions of users through monitoring tools. These tools scour social networks as well as blogs, forums and the media to find out who is saying what about a particular topic.

An important part of the methodology for monitoring is to be clear on which keywords define what we want to detect, and to make semantic dictionaries that help generate conclusions.

In this way, both companies and political parties can detect opinion leaders on a specific topic in order to have (or not have) a relationship with them. We can identify the habits and opinions of citizens through the opinions they express in online public spaces, and it is in this case that social media plays a very important role. A good analyst will be able to discern that there are platforms that tend to be positive, such as Instagram, and others where criticism is more frequent, such as Twitter.

Through proper analysis of the data, we can separate real users from fictitious ones, those who have an impact from those who do not, and decide whether we need to adjust our arguments, our communication or marketing to fit more or less with predominant opinions. This qualitative aspect of online monitoring is the one that provides the most value to companies and political parties, which are the two types of entities that are the focus of the report, which also includes contributions from psychologist Montserrat Gomà.