Using social media sentiment analysis to understand audiences: A new skill for technical communicators?

Social media communication is changing the opportunities for technical communicators to really understand audiences when these audiences are active about issues on social media platforms. Through applying ad-hoc corpus building processes to create word lists relevant to specific organizational projects, technical communicators can listen to their external users and identify areas of importance with greater accuracy. While other methods of sentiment analysis look for a solution that leads to artificial intelligence in the program, this paper identifies the present needs of a human interaction approach for contextually understanding social media posts. The human interaction step in ad-hoc corpus analysis is central to this methodology as it provides a means to ask critical questions of the content curated through the ad-hoc corpus directly. Results of ad-hoc corpus analysis from this critical lens can build upon organizational knowledge about ways in which their technologies are received and users perceive the organization.