Social Media Monitoring of Health Care Reform Topics

Social media dashboard for health care reform - click to enlarge

Now that it’s been a week since the health care reform bill was passed into law, it’s good timing to see how it played out in social media, where unbridled opinions spread like epidemics. Using Attensity360 social media monitoring software as a service, I built a dashboard to monitor the topic of “health care reform.”

Not surprisingly, the topic spiked on March 21 and March 22, in line with the House of Representatives’ approval of the bill on March 21. “Health care reform” was included in 210,157 posts over the last 30 days. The topic spiked from 6,504 mentions on March 20 to 33,701 mentions on March 21 and 33,991 mentions on March 22. Mentions steadily declined thereafter and settled at 5,283 at the end of the week on March 27.

Topic sentiment over the last 30 days was 34 percent positive, 31 percent negative, 29 percent neutral, and six percent mixed. Topic sentiment between March 19 and March 31 was 32 percent positive, 30 percent negative, 32 percent neutral, and six percent mixed.

The top five sources of the posts were Digg (1,402), Reddit (458), Gather (223), Amazon Politics Community (187), and Medlogs (177).  For each of the top sources, I can view reports for topic trend (how many posts per date), sentiment, daily traffic, U.S. demographics, and the top five articles this week that mention “health care reform.”

The top article for posts and comments this week from top source Digg was this Associated Press article, “Health overhaul likely to strain doctor shortage.” I can also view the comments on the article and interact directly with the authors of the comments. Here’s my comment: for those considering a medical career, now may be the time!

It’s clear from this social-media dashboard that positive, negative, and neutral opinions about health care reform are almost equal. This means that the proponents of health care reform, while winning the legislative battle, have a lot of PR to do to persuade the neutrals and the negatives to join the positive camp. Another look may reveal that the neutral articles were written by journalists, who are supposed to be neutral. TheAssociated Press article passed that test with a neutral sentiment rating.

The good news for all involved in health care reform is that, with Attensity360, they have cost-effective and instant access to the largest focus group in history: social media. Social media participation is growing just like universal health insurance, and organizations cannot ignore either of these developments.

How can social media monitoring apply in your organization? What if you could shape market perception, understand the buying process, respond to competitive threats, evaluate trends and issues, and improve the return on your marketing investment from product positioning, branding, PR, and marketing campaigns? What if you could help marketing to quickly determine whether their messages are gaining traction in the marketplace and which of those communication vehicles—including spokespeople—are most effective at delivering those messages?