How Are You Feeling?

Used to be that only pregnant women and your very closest friends and family got to tell you how they’re feeling. Suddenly, sharing feelings is all the rage. Breezy updates from current and ex-colleagues, personal friends and high school classmates are a constant on Facebook, and “friends” get to react to each feeling with a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Want to know how people are feeling all over the world? http://www.wefeelfine.org/ does a beautiful job of listening and then making the feelings knowable. Every few minutes, this site searches posted blog entries around the world for the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". It records the full sentence, and categorizes the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (sad, happy, depressed, etc.), and includes age, gender, and geographical location of the author. The result is a database of several million human feelings that can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices.

PR has an important role to play in this sea of emotion. Where our discipline has traditionally claimed “monitoring” as a key skill set, I’d argue that one of our most important contributions today is a new level of listening. It’s by actively listening that we are able to tap the arsenal of PR tools available – influencer relationships, traditional media relations and social media as the glue – to drive engagement for our brands, products and services. It’s by listening that we can take the overwhelming outpouring of emotion and make it knowable and actionable for our clients.

By the way, I feel fine and hope you do, too.

Kim