Brain Waves Blog

Media Coverage Shifts to Campus Experts

Today’s Briefing analyzes publicly available online conversation about coronavirus and higher education from March 20–23. In this analysis of volume, topics, sentiment, and key audiences, we highlight changing campus news coverage, trending hashtags (some may surprise you), and continuing expression of anger and sadness from students. Since the March 17 Briefing, we haven’t made any changes to our data collection. We have, however, improved our categorization of family and friend mentions; you’ll see a comparison of their expression of emotion in this Briefing.

Student Voices Surface in Media, on Reddit

We made a few changes to our query to capture all relevant conversation. We’re now including “the rona,” an emerging slang reference for coronavirus, mentions of cancellation or postponement of graduation, and new hashtags that refer to the virus (e.g., #BoomerDoomer, #BoomerRemover, #coronapocalypse).

Word of Mouth Drives Both Information and Misinformation with Students

Today’s briefing analyzes publicly available online conversation about coronavirus and higher education from March 13–16. In this analysis of volume, topics, sentiment, and key audiences, we highlight the most popular topics, continued negative sentiment, concerns of parents and admitted students, and surprising trends of where students discussed the issue online.

March Madness May Be Gone, But Meme Madness Is Here

As campuses and their constituents grapple with the implications of closures, extended-spring breaks, and online instruction to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic, online conversation on the topic is ballooning. We wanted to see the amount of conversation, find patterns, and develop insights to help campuses with their communication strategy. Yesterday (March 10), we gathered all of the online conversation about the coronavirus, higher education, related closures, and transitions to online coursework. Today, we analyzed it. Here’s what we found.

Crises happen. The ripples are felt in-person and online. While talking to every person affected would be helpful, it is not realistic. Social listening, however, gives campuses instant access to online conversations about a particular crisis as they emerge on social sites, in forums, on blogs, in the news, and on other websites. Furthermore, social listening allows for unique views into trends within those conversations as the crisis unfolds in real time. All in all, social listening puts campuses in a better position to plan or adjust crisis communication strategies in the moment based on emerging insights. But this is only effective with human analysts teaming up with technology to write the perfect query and easily visualize the data. 

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