There’s no denying that mainstream media still carries a lot of weight on issues. This is particularly obvious on the web sites of media organizations that have embraced social media. For those of us who work in public affairs, these sites provide invaluable insight into public opinion and communication anthropology.
My colleagues and I have been immersed in reading hundreds of comments left by Canadians on media sites that covered an issue that affects some of our clients. We built a matrix to evaluate all of the comments and discovered that the public response to and understanding of the issue was based on the coverage of each media organization. Suddenly, new stakeholders materialized and the public revealed their opinion about them.
Small and medium sized organizations should take note — when mainstream media incorporated comments on their web sites, they gave you the gift of free public opinion polling.
The excercise has led me to categorize commenters into five main categories and reinforced how much business intelligence any organization can gain from paying attention to digital conversation. That is, if you seek first to understand (and believe me, reading hundreds of comments is an important and valuable commitment) you can discover what the issue really is and who you should be reaching out to before you figure out what should be said.
Based on my share of the comments, I classified commenters into five categories:
INVOLVED – these are the people that are close to or very concerned about the issue. They know the stakeholders, they have intimate knowledge of the issue, and can analyze the different directions and effects of the issue on the fly. Involved commenters help keep the conversation relevant no matter their stance on the issue.
INFORMED – these are the people that have taken the time to learn more about the issue and its key players. They tend to know the history and appreciate the impacts. Informed commenters generally have a personal interest in the issue. They contribute new ideas to the conversation and help others understand by taking the time to offer valuable responses.
MISINFORMED – these are the people who have skimmed the article, may have misunderstood the information they received and have collected or were fed inaccurate information from other sources. This is the first level of commenter that lets their opinions cloud the issue by letting their opinions fill in the holes of their understanding. Misinformed commenters aren’t necessarily malicious.
UNINFORMED – this is where the participants in the conversation transition from being people to being commenters. The uninformed choose to let their opinion validate their broken logic. They aren’t interested in the back story and don’t know who the stakeholders are. In most cases, they’ve picked up on a single point of the article or taken a single piece of information out of context. Uninformed commenters like to pontificate and are happiest when they deconstruct what other people are saying, sometimes peppering their comments with personal attacks.
ANGRY – known for years as “flamers”, this is the angry mob of people who like to berate others no matter what the discussion is about. They’ve never heard of the issue and probably won’t come back to it. They spray their anger and leave. The angry use emotional attacks and have no interest in logic.
I decided to quantify five qualities of commenters based on several criteria with ratings of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). I used 0 to indicate none.
Now it becomes easier to figure out who to engage with, how and when.
