Agile Sentiment Analysis for more Responsive Public Relations

The constituting e-government organizations like ministries, agencies, funds and councils often have to deal with severe media attention and sometimes more or less justified criticism. In this paper we present an approach that supports the task of managing public relations (PR) between organizations and the news media. The proposed approach is based on agile sentiment analysis of the questions that organizations receive from the journalists and media. Such analysis is relevant for reviewing past events as well as predicting the future happenings. We demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach by analyzing a set of 298 questions received by a public organization from various media in the period from 2007 till 2012. The results confirm that that by incorporating agile sentiment analysis into regular PR workflow organizations can improve their understanding and control of communication with the media and public.