First, let us look at what public opinion monitoring covers and in what forms it exists.

Public opinion monitoring refers to the activity of monitoring and forecasting public opinions and views on the Internet. These remarks mainly exert a strong influence on hot issues, focal topics, tendencies and opinions in real life. Specifically, public opinion monitoring integrates Internet information collection technology and intelligent information processing technology to automatically capture massive online information, conduct automatic classification and clustering, and detect topics and thematic focuses.

It fulfills users’ information needs such as online public opinion monitoring and news topic tracking, and generates analysis results including briefings, reports and charts, so as to provide an analytical basis for clients to fully grasp the ideological trends of the public and carry out correct public opinion guidance.

Industrialization and service-orientation are the development trends of public opinion monitoring and analysis. Combining text classification, text clustering, text summarization and targeted analysis with corpora and knowledge bases, a SaaS-based public opinion semantic analysis infrastructure is established to better achieve human-machine integration and improve the accuracy of public opinion analysis.

Now that we understand what public opinion monitoring is, let us explore its significance.

When an incident breaks out, relevant information spreads rapidly in a short time, just like a stone thrown into water, arousing widespread public concern. Unreasonable arguments, rumors or negative reports often stimulate public anxiety to a certain extent and may even undermine consumers’ recognition of corporate brands.

Failure to analyze and respond with timely corrective measures may lead to unpredictable consequences. Therefore, it is crucial for relevant authorities and enterprises to pay attention to industry-sensitive public opinion.

At present, public opinion monitoring and management in most authorities and enterprises are mainly conducted manually. Departments and staff responsible for online public opinion monitoring are under enormous work pressure.

Manual public opinion monitoring also faces many problems: incomplete collection of public opinion, delayed detection, inaccurate analysis, inconvenient information utilization, and a series of other issues, which trouble enterprises greatly as it requires a large amount of manpower. This has given rise to professional service companies that conduct tailored analysis based on a company’s specific situation and develop a customized monitoring plan. We provide: Monitoring + Early Warning + Public Opinion Analysis Report = Professional Solutions.

The monitoring, early warning and control of online public opinion, especially negative public opinion, aim to effectively defuse online public opinion crises, covering three links: monitoring, early warning and response.

During the early warning stage, content is judged and summarized, and public opinions that may have a greater impact are screened to prepare for potential online public opinion incidents.

In the response stage, when online public opinion evolves into a real public opinion crisis, relevant government departments take specific actions to resolve the crisis and eliminate adverse effects. The organic combination of these three links forms the entire integrated emergency mechanism for online public opinion management.

As a saying goes: Nothing is trivial in monitoring; prevention is the priority. Nothing is difficult in monitoring as long as one is attentive.

---