Hidden Potential: Custom Communications with Your Audience

From a Blind Spot to a Dialogue: Why Analyze the Audience

HSE initiatives often crash against a wall of misunderstanding. As section moderator Mikhail Omelchuk notes, new employees require different approaches to training and development. Konstantin Ermolaev, Head of the Safety Culture Promotion Department at Nornickel, analyzes this problem at a fundamental level. When specialists approach workers with new rules or prohibitions, the information often turns into a "blind spot." Without understanding the audience's values and priorities, communication only causes resistance and irritation.

Social Media Analysis as the "New Oil" for HSE

To overcome the barrier of resistance, the speaker suggests using data from social networks. In single-industry towns like Norilsk and Monchegorsk, where most residents are company employees, local public pages become a treasure trove of information. Analyzing millions of posts and comments over several years has revealed the true moods, values, and behavioral patterns of workers.

• Identifying values: The analysis showed that employees are straightforward people with a huge demand for respect.
• Behavioral patterns: In the event of negative events, the reaction goes through stages from anger to support ("we are one family") and, finally, irony and sarcasm, which help cope with stress.
• Triggers and reactions: Honest and open dialogues significantly reduce negativity during emergencies, and visual content (nature, beauty) helps to distract from problems.

From Data to Effective Communications

The presentation details the process of turning metadata into practical tools. The insights gained allowed adjusting the editorial policy of corporate communication channels. The coincidence of intuitive approaches with real data was 70-80%, but the remaining percentages revealed important areas for growth. For example, it turned out that employees want to hear safety stories not from the HSE department, but from their own colleagues, through personal example.

Technical Implementation: How to Collect and Process Millions of Comments

The speaker shows by example that manual data collection is inefficient. To analyze 4.5 million messages, a special program was developed capable of automatically collecting information from social networks. Standard neural networks could not cope with such volumes, so it was necessary to create a custom tool for linguistic analysis and identifying key metrics. It took about three months from the idea to the implementation of the project.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to stop being a "blind spot" for employees and start speaking their language?
• What tools to use for mass analysis of moods in the team?
• How irony and sarcasm help workers cope with stress and how to use this in communications?
• Why an open dialogue is more effective than dry instructions in the event of an emergency?
• How to identify hidden opinion leaders through digital footprint analysis?