Experiential Listening: The New Frontier in Aggregating More Accurate Social Data As a Foundation for Public Health Communication

Background: The proliferation of e-cigarettes has presented a new public health challenge. From claims that e-cigarettes are safer than conventional cigarettes, to conflicting international studies and findings, to youth-appealing flavors, to e-cigarette explosions, the public health community faces yet another challenge in protecting people and teens from the dangers of smoking. In fact, with e-cigarette use rising in recent years, the potential for e-cigarette explosions—which has resulted in severe injuries and hospitalizations—is also increasing. But how do people report such adverse events to government which is critical public health data? Do they even know you can? A quick Google search for “report e-cigarette explosion” yields no government-related results on howto report such an event, just news reports on e-cigarette explosions and viral videos which have garnered nationwide coverage by outlets such as CNN. This presents a unique challenge for government entities such as FDA and NIH who are seeking to collect such product safety data. There is clearly a need for more refined processing of social content and data related to adverse health events to better understand the complexity of diverse audiences and inform people on how and whythey should report such health events to government.  

Program background: Experiential listening is an enhanced approach to social listening that considers the unique dimensions and attributes of everyday people and the visuals, such as pictures and emoticons, they share online. At IQ Solutions, our data analysts and social media strategists employ a unified textual and visual listening approach to analyzing and evaluating the experiences that people share online as users, customers, constituents, patients, residents, and a community. Our team goes beyond traditional social listening data collection methods and analyses and uses APIs and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to identify public health issues communicated on social media platforms in textual and visual formats related to incidences of e-cigarette explosions.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Experiential listening and evaluation methodologies will be demonstrated, and utilization data will be presented, including:

• o   How to collect textual and visual social media data;
• o   How to intercept relevant conversations that offer engagement opportunities;
• o   How experiential listening offers an enhanced view of social media listening resulting in richer and more actionable social intelligence, providing more comprehensive data around which to build public health communication.

  Conclusions:

• Experiential listening offers an expanded view of the social space and the conversations taking place around health and health-related topics—revealing new outreach and engagement opportunities, and untapped audiences. Ultimately, this enhanced approach offers richer and more precise insights to help collect valuable public health data and inform proactive public health communications.

  Implications for research and/or practice: Considering the diverse ways in which people share their real-life experiences online is necessary to not only understanding how to effectively reach and engage users, but how to point them to credible public health resources. This is especially critical in the public health realm where user/patient data has historically been private, but aspects are rapidly moving toward the public domain.