Social Listening to Enhance Access to Appropriate Pandemic Information Among Culturally Diverse Populations: Case Study From Finland

Abstract

Background Social listening, the process of monitoring and analyzing conversations to inform communication activities, is an essential component of infodemic management. It helps inform context-specific communication strategies that are culturally acceptable and appropriate for various subpopulations. Social listening is based on the notion that target audiences themselves can best define their own information needs and messages. Objective This study aimed to describe the development of systematic social listening training for crisis communication and community outreach during the COVID-19 pandemic through a series of web-based workshops and to report the experiences of the workshop participants implementing the projects. Methods A multidisciplinary team of experts developed a series of web-based training sessions for individuals responsible for community outreach or communication among linguistically diverse populations. The participants had no previous training in systematic data collection or monitoring. This training aimed to provide participants with sufficient knowledge and skills to develop a social listening system based on their specific needs and available resources. The workshop design took into consideration the pandemic context and focused on qualitative data collection. Information on the experiences of the participants in the training was gathered based on participant feedback and their assignments and through in-depth interviews with each team. Results A series of 6 web-based workshops was conducted between May and September 2021. The workshops followed a systematic approach to social listening and included listening to web-based and offline sources; rapid qualitative analysis and synthesis; and developing communication recommendations, messages, and products. Follow-up meetings were organized between the workshops during which participants could share their achievements and challenges. Approximately 67% (4/6) of the participating teams established social listening systems by the end of the training. The teams tailored the knowledge provided during the training to their specific needs. As a result, the social systems developed by the teams had slightly different structures, target audiences, and aims. All resulting social listening systems followed the taught key principles of systematic social listening to collect and analyze data and used these new insights for further development of communication strategies. Conclusions This paper describes an infodemic management system and workflow based on qualitative inquiry and adapted to local priorities and resources. The implementation of these projects resulted in content development for targeted risk communication, addressing linguistically diverse populations. These systems can be adapted for future epidemics and pandemics.

Barriers to vaccine acceptance in the adult population of mainland Finland, 2021

“…Several serious diseases and medical histories have been found to be associated with lower vaccination uptake for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, in line with our findings that poorer health is associated with barriers to vaccine acceptance [ 14 – 16 ]. People with poorer medical conditions may be more hesitant due to increased worry about possible adverse reactions to vaccines [ 5 , 32 , 33 ]. Living outside Finland’s metropolitan areas has been found to increase barriers to vaccine acceptance [ 5 , 34 ], which is in line with our findings on the media’s responsibility.…”

Association of sociodemographic characteristics with self-perceived access to COVID-19 information and adherence to preventive measures among migrant origin and general populations in Finland: a cross-sectional study

“…Other possible reasons for the observed association should be explored in further studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland, social listening was introduced to gather signals from diverse population groups on their perceptions and needs related to the crisis 36. Multilingual crisis communications were developed in close collaboration with regional health and welfare professionals, key community representatives and migrant origin populations.…”

“…During the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland, social listening was introduced to gather signals from diverse population groups on their perceptions and needs related to the crisis. 36 Multilingual crisis communications were developed in close collaboration with regional health and welfare professionals, key community representatives and migrant origin populations. In addition to these, COVID-19 incidence was regularly followed and the MigCOVID Survey, which constitutes the basis for this study, was launched to gather population-based data on experiences during COVID-19 among migrant origin populations.…”

Informing social media analysis for public health: a cross-sectional survey of professionals

“…Since 2020, WHO has formally trained over 1300 infodemic managers from 142 countries [ 8 ], with an additional 6500 certified completions of the online OpenWHO infodemic management course to February 2023 [ 9 ]. Other organizations are building capacity at global, national and sub-national levels, and infodemic response teams have been established in many settings including Germany [ 10 ], Ghana [ 11 ], New York City [ 12 ], Finland [ 13 ], Indonesia [ 14 ] and through the Africa Infodemic Response Alliance [ 15 ], and the Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization[ 16 ], amongst others. The infodemic has required workforce capacity building and training, at a time that many in the health workforce and emergency response were already managing multiple roles, new tasks, as well as unpreceded personal and professional challenges.…”

“…These could be digital sources (such as social media data, google trends data or website analytics) or non-digital (such as healthcare worker hotlines, focus group data or talk-back radio data). During the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice of social listening grew significantly with regular social listening reports produced by global organizations [ 19 ], regions [ 15 , 20 ] and countries [ 13 , 21 ]. Understanding the gist, velocity, volume and underlying drivers of narratives circulating in communities can help to inform pre-bunking and debunking initiatives, fill information gaps, and inform infodemic response [ 19 ].…”