Using markers for digital engagement and social change: Tracking meaningful narrative exchange in transmedia edutainment with text analytics techniques

Abstract

While social media offer an unprecedented opportunity for orchestrating large-scale communication campaigns, it is often difficult to track audience responses on various digital platforms over time and to ascertain if their engagement is aligned with the original intention. In this article, we share a promising solution—the purposive embedding and tracking of unique content elements as “markers” using text analytics techniques. Four markers were introduced in an Indian melodramatic television serial, Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon ( I, A Woman, Can Achieve Anything), which was part of a larger transmedia edutainment initiative in India to promote sanitation, family planning, and gender equality. These markers served as anchors for audience engagement with the originally intended messaging embedded in the narratives as well as for program monitoring and evaluation. We applied various web-based tools to systematically track marker-related engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube across eight months. We also conducted semantic network analysis to better understand how marker-related social media comments evolved over time. Our investigation of using markers for digital engagement and narrative exchange in MKBKSH makes an important and timely methodological contribution to the scholarship and praxis of social and behavior change communication.

What We Need Now to Accelerate Climate Solutions through Storytelling

“…These formal program evaluations can more systematically guide the design of messaging embedded in the entertainment narrative experience and associated media products. In a fully developed entertainment-education plan, there are components that would improve the systemization of the whole process such as including data-powered positive deviance (Albanna et al, 2022) for identifying positive outlier behaviors at scale and the use of digital markers (Lutkenhaus et al, 2022) for tracking meaningful audience engagement and prosocial behaviors. Creating entertainment-education programs would empower us to meet our full potential for climate action.…”

What to watch: Practical considerations and strategies for using YouTube for research

“…YouTube is owned by Google and is the most popular video-hosting site in the world, boasting 2 billion users (i.e., nearly 1/3 of all internet users; 21 and over 500 h of content uploaded every minute, 22 and over 1 billion hours of videos watched per day. 23 Previous research has leveraged this data for content and thematic analyses, 24,25 development of instruments, 26 large-scale interventions, 27 and commentary on YouTube itself as a phenomenon. 28 YouTube's popularity as a platform has resulted in handbooks and book chapters detailing how the platform may be leveraged for research.…”