We’ve been using this blog as a space for highlighting insights generated by StatSocial’s new Crisis Insights service.
Built on StatSocial’s Silhouette™ social data platform, the service has been devised as a tool for brands, marketers, and agencies seeking to understand the rapidly changing dynamics of their customers who, as a result of the uncertainty born of the COVID-19 pandemic, are finding their own perspectives, concerns, and needs shifting daily.
Silhouette™ monitors and analyzes more than 1.3 billion social accounts, encompassing more than 70% of U.S. households. It is the only platform that tracks and segments social audiences at such a scale.
Crisis Insights tracks all changes in consumer sentiment, relating to 32 brand-new insight segments — all formed in the wake of the epidemic — across four general categories:
- People concerned about the Covid-19 epidemic
- People concerned about the direction of the economy
- People coping with, and adjusting to, the ‘new normal’ environment
- General attitudes among, and the psychographic outlook of, the population.
In this entry, we will be focused on the first and fourth categories.
Thanks to our partnership with IBM Watson™ and our integration of their powerful Personality Insights tool into our reporting, we can tell you not just who the people are who make up a given audience, but how they are.
Using linguistic analysis, Personality Insights™ scours all digital communications generated by the members of an audience being analyzed by StatSocial, including email, blogs, tweets, and forum posts. From there an incredibly accurate personality profile of that audience is created.
When categorizing personalities, Personality Insights™ uses for its top tier, the Big Five personality traits, a widely adopted taxonomy in the psychological community.
Those traits are, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Each of the big five can get more granular in their descriptions, with each holding under its umbrella a number of sub-categories.
With that, we present…
The Top Personality Traits Among those Most Engaged with COVID-19 News Online
Explanation of the below data: The Percentile column shows where this audience (those most engaged with online news relating to COVID-19) ranks among the greater U.S. population when it comes to possessing the corresponding personality trait.
The Index score quantifies where this result falls in relation to the average. 50th percentile is the average, and an Index score of 100 also reflects average. So, an index score of 125 would mean the corresponding percentile exceeds the average by 0.25 (or ¼).
Those Index scores that exceed the average will be shown in green, and those falling short will be shown in red.
The most immediately apparent observation is that, of the Big Five, Openness is powerfully evident here. We see that of the many traits that fall under the Openness header, Imagination and Intellect outrank them all. Indeed, those traits are comfortably evident here to a degree that exceeds the U.S. average.
Liberalism, in this context, does not necessarily mean what many may think at first glance. It is not a political designation. Personality Insights™ defines liberalism as “a readiness to challenge authority, convention, and traditional values.” And here, it also ranks highly, as does Adventurousness.
On the other end of the spectrum, some traits that can be found in abundance among the average American audience are not all that detectable here.
Agreeableness, which describes “a person’s tendency to be compassionate and cooperative toward others,” according to IBM, is measurable here to a degree falling well below the average.
Conscientiousness relates to “a person’s tendency to act in an organized or thoughtful way.” Orderliness is a natural sub-category of that, relating to the degree to which people are “well-organized, tidy, and neat.” At this moment in time, those most engaged with online reporting about the COVID-19 epidemic are coming up well below the average in this regard.
These personality traits, as well as the Needs and Values that we share, when taken in the context of Crisis Insights — and its almost real-time measuring of changing sentiments — are a crucial gauge of the public mood, outlook, and spirit.
This demonstration also illustrates one of the many ways our reporting can be can be used to compare and contrast the sentiment detectable among a greater audience with that of a more specific one.
We again eagerly invite you to visit Crisis Insights, and reach out to us to learn a great deal more about the service, and to check out a demo.
As always, we deeply hope that all reading are well and safe, and are getting through this all to the very best of your abilities.
We encourage you to visit these previously shared Crisis Insights related posts:
Here we examine the preferred TV genres of those most active in the online COVID-19 discussion:
Here we take a look at some top-line demographic and geographic data regarding those most actively engaged in the online, COVID-19 discussion:
And here you’ll find our entry announcing and introducing Crisis Insights: