Dolly gets her coronavirus vaccine
East Tennessee’s heart and soul, Dolly Parton, has now received her vaccine for SARS-COV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.The country music superstar announced Tuesday via social media that she received the Moderna vaccine from Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Parton has already had a hand in the efforts to research, develop, and distribute a coronavirus vaccine. In November, she made headlines when she donated $1 million to the research team at Vanderbilt, which partnered with pharmaceutical giant Moderna.
Following the announcement of her shot, Parton also posted a video in which she encouraged others to get the vaccine. The 75-year-old also sang a version of her song “Jolene,” in which she changed the word to ‘vaccine.’
Naturally, as popular as Parton is, the response to her vaccination has been strong. Her post itself has received nearly 335,000 likes as of 3:30 pm ET Wednesday afternoon.
Still, we wanted to see just what the response to Parton has been. Luckily for us, we have the power of Salesforce’s Social Studio to help look at the social media conversation.
Using the keywords “dolly” and “vaccine” as well as “dolly” and “shot,” a Social Studio search found just north of 40,000 posts made over the previous seven days. Interestingly, 60% of the posts were made by women. Sentiment analysis is not as effective, since ‘shot’ is considered a negative word, though it obviously is not in this context. Instead, the following word cloud shows some specifics with what is being said:
Digging a little deeper, the age 35-44 demographic is most posting about Parton. And within that age, women are again most posting, but in the 25-34 age group, it’s the men that have taken more to the topic and posted about it.
A look at hashtags can also show sentiment and what is being mentioned with the topic. And in this case, #covid19 and #vaccine are unsurprisingly at the top. But #anchordown, a term associated with Vanderbilt, helps show that this news is drawing some publicity for Vanderbilt. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is also being mentioned with #maddow, in response to her mention on social media, as well as her show.
It seems overall, the world has rejoiced that Parton has been vaccinated. We’ll continue to monitor this and other topics from our perch on the fourth floor of the College of Communication and Information, in the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center.