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Social Listening for Social Justice
Listening to Understand
“Read the room” is a phrase often shared among exasperated communicators when organizations post insensitive marketing messages during times when their audience feels unsafe, attacked, or othered as they reel from an act of oppression. Repeatedly, brands, campuses, and individuals fail to recognize the trauma and aggression many populations experience daily, like violence against Black Americans, attacks on Jewish community centers, legislation limiting the rights of trans people, or hate crimes on campus. They choose to ignore what’s happening around them rather than speaking out, taking action, or engaging in dialogue with their community.
Reading the room means listening to understand. And when people are more likely to tell their social networks how they feel than organizations, social listening is the best way to read the room.
As a brand, you may see this as a defensive activity: a way to take the pulse before determining what you can or should say in a public forum. We challenge you to see listening as a proactive, ongoing strategy to deepen your understanding of your community—particularly those whose voices have been marginalized or are underrepresented.
Seek Broader Perspectives
Strategic social listening identifies marginalized and underrepresented voices within your campus community, so you can better understand varied experiences, amplify the perspectives being shared, and provide appropriate offline resources.
For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, we helped the higher education industry elevate and understand the experiences of Black members of their communities by looking for the words black or African American within a larger dataset about higher ed and COVID-19. We found that at some campuses, students used unique and specific hashtags to tell their story, like #BlackAtMizzou. An analysis of hashtags like this one and others, like #BlackLivesMatter, #StopKillingUs, or #BLM surfaced public conversations illustrating what members of these communities wanted their campus to know, even if it wasn’t what administrators wanted to hear.
While often conversations about the Black experience were just one percent of our dataset (even when thousands of mentions existed), a proactive approach to uncovering these voices was necessary to understand the role they played in the moment and ensure they weren’t drowned out by other voices.
Social listening can also help you understand and support your LGBTQIA+ population on campus. In addition to #Pride2021 and #PrideMonth, listen in spaces where queer and trans* people are active online, like Twitter, TikTok, Discord, and Tumblr. There’s a significant overlap between the LGBTQIA+ community and higher education community on all four platforms.
This is directly applicable to your campus: When marginalized and underrepresented members of your community shout in hopes you’ll listen, they may be more likely to do so on social media. During the summer of 2020, Black members of campus communities used hashtags like #BlackAt<Campus>, #BlackInHESA, and #BlackInTheIvory to share their experiences with systemic and overt racism—pervasive experiences that have also been documented in places like Inside Higher Ed. They posted to Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit and used the same messages to chant outside some administration buildings when they returned to campus that fall. If you listened as the crisis unfolded, you might have taken time to reflect, sought to understand, and partnered with these community members to prepare a new path forward.
Build a Proactive Strategy
Many campuses know intimately what it feels like when an issue captures the attention of their community, and the subsequent uptick in social media mentions is what typically spurs first-time interest in social listening. While listening at any time is better than not listening at all, doing so proactively may help prevent or lessen the impact of crises. Building a proactive social listening strategy means that you:
- Commit to listening consistently and often to all voices within your community.
- Purposefully seek to understand the experiences of non-white, LGTBQIA+, disabled, and other voices that may be overshadowed by the historical majority.
- Regularly review the conversation trends from—and about—these groups.
When combined with other diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies, this data will provide leadership with a better understanding of the experience of the students, staff, and alumni they serve. You may also spot students and community members who are already leading informal DEI efforts and have the potential to influence their peers. Consider how your campus can support their work.
You should also be prepared to take action when you encounter behavior toward these groups that causes harm.
From keeping a pulse on your campus during the pandemic when much of our interaction was online to creating a more inclusive and supportive community—social listening gives you insights to take timely and informed action.
Acknowledge the Issues
When social justice issues arise on your campus, social listening equips you with the tools to more effectively serve your community. In 2020, a small private college who wanted to understand the flash point of a racial justice issue on campus. As a Campus Sonar partner, social listening enabled them to:
- Quantify the size and reach of the vocal members of the campus community.
- Understand their grievances and the desired response from campus administration.
- Identify opportunities to foster meaningful dialogue and rebuild trust.
- Develop appropriate responses to individuals addressing the college directly.
Additionally, we advised campus communicators on potential strategies to “read the room” and avoid making a negative situation worse with marketing messages that were inappropriate to the moment. With these steps in place, the campus moved forward in a positive and constructive way, both online and offline, in partnership with their campus community.
React Appropriately
Despite ongoing DEI efforts, members of your campus community may act in ways that oppress others or cause trauma and the institution will need to react. Timely information about the public response and reaction to an issue can help you determine an appropriate course of action to make things right. In 2021, we worked with a small private college who found themselves in this situation. Social listening allowed them to:
- Identify the concerns of the community, and map connections to previous incidents.
- Quantify how much of the conversation about their campus centered on the issue.
- Understand who within their community (e.g., students, alumni, prospective students) was discussing it.
With this understanding in hand, they could work most effectively toward issue resolution, taking action to reach out to affected communities and ensure that similar actions would not take place in the future.
Improve Campus Climate
Understanding and uncovering marginalized voices also helps you keep a pulse on your campus climate. We believe campus climate matters, and the examples we’ve shared underscore its importance. Climate is a critical component of the student experience at any college or university. Ultimately, it affects all students’ learning and development and can have outsized impact on historically excluded student groups on campus. Further, a better climate makes your college more competitive in the higher education marketplace; like all other products in the market, students want their colleges to represent their values.
Social listening can find honest, real-time conversations happening organically. It can identify when a flashpoint on campus remains isolated or if the situation becomes more pernicious, creating a lasting effect on your campus. When you want to know how people feel, you can ask. Over time, you can build trust with all your community members so leaders are more likely to hear from historically marginalized groups. Or you could just listen. We believe you should do both.
Support Meaningful Change
Social listening gives you the insight and understanding you need to support change on your campus. If you don’t know where to start or have the budget to support any paid social listening tools or services, there are free social listening tools and tactics to help you get started with basic listening.
Strategic social listening for social justice requires an ongoing effort, but yields positive results. As you seek to understand the diverse experiences of your campus community:
- Look for the hashtags, comment threads, and accounts that help online social justice movements coalesce as they will enable you to listen more effectively.
- Use social listening to find and listen to voices that may otherwise go unnoticed by campus leaders.
- Share the trends and experiences you observe with campus leadership, using crucial qualitative data to approach this work with empathy.
- Partner with underserved communities to create an inclusive campus environment.