Jersey - you are 56.5% happy!

Tuesday 22 March 2016

Jersey-based digital communications agency Marcom Collective Limited, has published the first online Happiness Index for the Island.

Published to coincide with International Happiness Day, the index has been created using sophisticated technology, which collates data from open sources, including social media, and assigns a sentiment to what people and news sources based in Jersey are saying online to find out how happy everyone is (or isn’t!).

The initial Happiness Index is an analysis of data collected between 12^th March 2016 and 18^th March 2016 and shows that 56.5% of posts were expressing positivity, while 43.5% posts were expressing negativity.  The top things people talked about over the past week include:

1.     Condor Ferries/Condor Liberation Deficiencies

2.     Jersey Youth Assembly

3.     Sunny Weather forecast for Friday 18^th March

4.     Sport Relief Challenges/Comic Relief Fundraising

5.     Morgan Huelin Case

6.     Jersey RFC winning 15-19 victory at Bedford

The technology picks up and collates data from over 650 million open data sources, including all public social media channels, comment forums and blogs. It then attributes positive or negative sentiment to the sources and detects key words and phrases that the user programmes in to establish the cause of individuals’ feelings, and provide deeper insight. 

Marcom currently utilises these radiant listening tools to provide services to their clients, for example to assess how their brands are performing against competitors, what their target markets are most interested in and how their clients feel about their companies. This is the first time that the technology has been used to measure the feelings and topical interests in the Channel Islands in this way.

Dara Lutes-Guest, Owner and Managing Director at Marcom Collective Limited, said:  “We use technology to help our clients to understand and improve their online environment and brand perceptions every day, but we really wanted to see if we could also use the same systems to measure things more generally in Jersey.

"Of course, not everyone shares their views and feelings online, so the index is limited to that extent, but it certainly provides a useful snapshot in time of what has captured people’s attention, and also how they feel about it.  The next question we are asking ourselves at Marcom is, ‘now that we have this information, how can we use our skills to make the island a happier place?’ We already have some ideas and will be making some announcements throughout the year about how we hope to do this.”

Marcom will continue to post the Jersey Online Happiness Index on their website every Friday and will then publish a report detailing the full year of Jersey’s happiness levels for International Happiness Day on March 20^th 2017.