Customer Stories
Cutting through the noise and mastering real-time community listening
Using the power of social listening to filter out distractions and highlight the conversations that truly matter.
South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) brings together the local authorities of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. Combined, they have a shared purpose to create a stronger, greener, fairer South Yorkshire. Working together, they aim to unlock the potential of South Yorkshire’s businesses and places.
The challenge
With growing public interest in the Mayoral Combined Authority, its growing role in devolution, and major regional initiatives such as the new Doncaster Sheffield Airport project (DSA), SYMCA required a more structured approach to social media monitoring. Before standardising the set-up, the team was hindered by disorganised streams and an influx of irrelevant social noise. This lack of real-time visibility ultimately led to unreliable reporting. SYMCA’s end goal was to streamline its monitoring framework, improve real-time oversight, and extract meaningful, actionable insights from its social media data.
The solution
SYMCA enlisted Orlo’s help to overhaul its strategy, replacing disorganised feeds with structured, purpose-built listening streams and tailored exclusion lists to help it focus on what really matters. To effectively capture and segment online conversations, the team worked with Orlo’s Value Delivery Team and launched three dedicated listening streams:
- Stream 1: Organisational Presence: a catch-all for SYMCA mentions designed to provide comprehensive coverage of brand discussions across X and Facebook.
- Stream 2: Executive Leadership: dedicated to Mayor mentions for the real-time tracking of public perception and sentiment.
- Stream 3: Critical Developments: focused specifically on the DSA project to capture community views on major regional developments.
To support this framework, SYMCA utilised Orlo’s real-time dashboards for immediate, live monitoring of inbound messages into its Unified Inbox, allowing the team to quickly spot important mentions while filtering out the noise. The team also implemented AI Theme Alerts, setting up automated triggers to alert key personnel if high message volumes required urgent attention. In addition, automated inbound tagging was introduced to categorise messages based on key terms, allowing easy filtering and accurate analysis within their Insights reports.
The results
By structuring its social listening, SYMCA successfully eliminated irrelevant noise and ensured that its data was directly relevant to specific areas of interest. The team deployed custom filtered reports, with each of the three streams (organisational, leadership, and developments) receiving its own dedicated analytics dashboard.
By using key Insights widgets, SYMCA can now effectively track positive and negative themes at a glance. These analytical reports measure overall sentiment and public trust for each individual topic, including SMYCA as an organisation, the Mayor, and the DSA project.
Since implementing this new approach, the team have gained visibility on an 83% increase in trust around the SYMCA brand, an 8% increase in trust around Mayoral mentions and identified curiosity and excitement in relation to the DSA project. Insights which can be fed back internally to senior leadership, as well as helping to inform future comms strategies.
The team at SYMCA have since expanded this approach to include other key projects, such as the launch of their new transport brand, the South Yorkshire People’s Network, so that they always have their fingers on the pulse of their community. And the journey with Orlo doesn’t stop there: they’re in the process of adding WhatsApp as a new channel for residents and integrating their CRM system into the Orlo platform, enabling them to ultimately combine the data in their CRM with community insights data to provide a 360° view of their residents.
Tools
3
purpose-built listening streams
Outcome
83%
increase in trust around the SYMCA brand
Outcome
8%
increase in trust around Mayoral mentions
Outcome
Curiosity and Excitement
top emotions linked to the DSA project
