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Purdue launches tool to track #meat mentions in social media and online news

Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability has released a meat sentiment dashboard to track mentions of meat and meat alternatives in social media and online news.

Nicole Olynk Widmar is a professor and associate department head in agricultural economics at Purdue.

“This dashboard is an attempt to make data that we’ve been collecting for some time now user friendly so that you can come to the dashboard and see the volume of media devoted to meat,” she says. “Users can break it down by beef vs pork vs meat alternatives etc. as well as the sentiment, which we can think about as the positivity or negativity, surrounding those conversations.”

People can explore sentiment and volume of #meat mentions in each state or the entire country going back to April 2020.

She tells Brownfield the overall sentiment is positive.

“Of course we’re talking about millions of data points,” she says. “…we see a lot of conversations about positivity surrounding different meat products that are available, but we also see people voicing concerns and voicing interest in learning more about topics. On the whole, the data that’s posted right now has a positive average net sentiment for all of those topics, but each of them has quite a bit of movement on a weekly basis when you look at conversations about one topic or a news hit about one topic versus another.” 

Widmar says the tool will benefit the livestock industry as well as other food sectors.

“There’s a public data for the public good component in terms of understanding what people are saying about different meat products over time and different states, but I also think it’s helpful for livestock industries as well as other food industries to gain a better understanding about what the general public is sharing online about those products,” she says. “It’s pretty common for individual companies to be doing social media listening and hearing what people are saying about them. It’s less obvious where livestock industries or commodity products or meat as a whole would make that investment, so that’s the place that Purdue seeks to fill. This sort of public good of making the data available so that people can better understand the industry and better understand consumers’ concerns.”

The dashboard’s color-coded sentiment gradient ranges from dark green from 100 percent positive to dark red for 100 percent negative.

She says the tool is updated weekly and users can expect to “arrive at that dashboard and select if you want to see meat as a whole or break it down. You’re going to see numerical quantification of the sentiment as well as the total volume in terms of posts, or the volume of total media devoted to that topic. That’s data that we’ve been collecting for some time using that NetBase Quid as a social listening tool. So, those are searches that we parameterized as researchers, and we’ve been collecting that volume and positivity/negativity data for some time but now individual users can come to that dashboard and dive into that on weekly basis.”

The dashboard is a collaboration between Widmar and Jayson Lusk, the head and distinguished professor of ag economics at Purdue.

CDFAS has a full lineup of free-to-access food system dashboards.

Audio: Nicole Olynk Widmar

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