Mining Social Media for Trends and Sentiments: A Case Study Using Poison Control

Background:  Consumers are getting and giving advice about health through social media. Social media offers volumes of rapid, real-time, self-reported and unfiltered information about the public’s health.  

Program background:  We wanted to explore how consumers view poisoning and discuss their experience of poison control services in  social media to determine if such channels offered an entry point for public health interventions or promotion opportunities. We were also curious if the unsolicited information posted by consumers correlated with findings from a recent research on the same topic. Using a subscription service that aggregates streams of information from the social and traditional web, hundreds of thousands of blog sites, online discussion forums, Twitter feeds and news articles were searched. Words used in conjunction with “poison control” were analyzed to determine context and ranked for sentiment. Facebook was excluded because it does not allow outside services access to data.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  In a 3 month period in 2010 “poison control” appeared in 1100 blog posts, 428 comments on blog sites, 860 discussion forums, and 160 Twitter feeds. Nearly 30% of social media mentions using the words “poison” and “control” were unrelated to an experience with a poison control service. Relevant mentions, largely by parents connecting with other parents, skewed negative in sentiment. More detailed observation of individual posts revealed that the actual experience of talking with a poison control service was generally positive, but needing the service produced negative sentiment. Terms such as “parenting fail” and “bad parent” were commonly included in these posts.

Conclusions:  Similar sentiment surfaced in a series of 10 focus groups with parents in 2010, but parents appeared more forthcoming talking to peers on social media than in person. The posts afforded opportunities to engage directly with consumers, which helped build a community of parents who were then able to champion poison centers as a resource.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Social media offers significant opportunities for understanding consumer health behavior that are more cost-effective than traditional research methods. Observing health “crowdsourcing” and unfiltered experience also affords opportunities for direct engagement.