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Social MediaCapturing Audience Sentiment - What Periscope Means To Social Media Marketing
Sam Seaborn: The dials go from zero to 100. They dial up if they like what he's saying. They dial down if they don't. All the numbers lead to a central computer.Lisa Sherborne: Like the Nielsens.
The West Wing, as you know, is one of my favorite television series. During the third season, President Bartlett was tasked with delivering the annual State Of The Union address, after having just been censured by Congress for not revealing his MS. On the night of the speech, Press Secretary CJ Craig allows a journalist from Vanity Fair, Lisa Sherborne, access to their control room where communications deputy Sam Seaborn, who was also Lisa's ex-fiance, is monitoring the impact the speech has. While Lisa is trying to talk to him, he's busy watching a series of monitors that are displaying multiple line graphs. When she asks what he's looking at, he explains, and gives viewers everywhere an inside glimpse into what it's like to create content for your audience based on audience sentiment.
It looks something like this:
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With this kind of data, speechwriters are able to determine which sections of the speech resonate with their audience and which sections do not. They can hone and polish the words they use, their cadence, and the overall message being delivered. It's become an invaluable aspect of modern speech writing.
As a blog writer, I can only imagine how helpful it would be to know from a reader at what point in my article they got lost or confused, or which sentence was so powerful it made them literally stop and think.
While this level of feedback would be incredibly useful, there are two major challenges of implementation.
First, in order to secure this data, groups and measuring systems have to be set up in advance. The President's staff and other politicians use focus groups. The Neilsens, the television ratings group that you've no doubt heard of, chooses families in advance and installs special equipment in their homes...