Monitoring of social media conversations in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake was found mainly to be useful in two ways:
1. Analysing public reactions to media reports: The data enabled the team and clients to see which issues were widely discussed, and whether these conversations led to sustained discussion or merely short-term spikes. (See detailed example in Annex 1.)
2. Seeing the relative prevalence of topics and identifying changes: Where a pure quantitative analysis can only show that a certain area of discussion is gaining or losing volume, a qualitative analysis was able to identify which sub-topics gained importance. For example, a shift in conversation from response-related topics towards reconstruction.
