INTRODUCTION
It’s important to keep in mind that social media is meant for two-way communication. Oftentimes, municipalities will only communicate to their audiences but never or hardly ever listen to what they have to say.
Social listening is the process of tracking social media mentions of your brand; conversations about your brand, product or service; audience sentiments; and trends in your industry. The data that you collect can help your organization gather feedback on a particular effort, take advantage of new opportunities, avoid or mitigate potential threats and determine gaps in service, among many other uses.
These days, your municipality can use AI to aid your social listening efforts to better serve residents, businesses and visitors of your community. Here are a few ways to use AI for social listening.
IDENTIFY CONCERNS AND POTENTIAL CRISES
Set up AI to track concerns and complaints. You will need to upload keywords and phrases associated with what you would consider a concern or complaint (e.g., “trash pickup”). AI can then label posts as one or the other, and then you can determine what action, if any, you want to take.
In addition, you can automate alerts for potential or actual crises taking place in your municipality. Examples could include natural disasters (e.g., flooding, tornadoes), utility-related (e.g., gas leaks) and crime (e.g., active shooter). The early heads-up you get can provide your municipality precious time in your response and mitigation efforts.
In both cases, you will need to choose which social media platforms to monitor, and AI can do so in real-time.
SET UP IMAGE RECOGNITION
You can train AI to recognize images, too. For example, perhaps you want to be alerted when residents are posting photos of potholes in their neighborhood. You will need to submit images of potholes to your AI tool for training data and then adjust the model until it achieves a level of accuracy that you find acceptable.
You also can have AI look for specific images in videos. This involves splitting the video into frames as part of the training process.
And yes, you can have AI track people. Your municipality could be on the lookout for a fugitive, for instance.
Note that some AI tools may have existing pre-trained models that you can use instead of building a model from scratch.