The SME Annual Meeting & Exhibit was in Salt Lake City, Utah this year and the keynote subject was leadership in Uncertain Times. It was also emphasized that mining is not a matter of investing in the local community anymore, connecting and being part of the community is the key to success. Anti-mining groups have a strong communication network in social media. Mining industry has considered sustainability and stakeholder studies as a part of their PR strategy and blinked the fact that social media is the new platform for networking on this subject. Mining engineers are not familiar with manipulating social media to analyze and take action against misinformation. It is possible to collect data in an automated way and use data mining to conduct sentiment analysis. However, off-the-shelf algorithms come short when comments are written in a sarcastic way. More information about stakeholder listening and analysis can be found here:

http://www.stakeholderla.com