How fast-spreading anger on social media can hurt your brand
Anger makes the web spin round. More so than sadness, disgust or even joy, anger is the emotion most likely to make consumers hit retweet or share, according to a new study out of Beihang University in China.
After studying over 70 million posts from 200,000 users on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular micro blogging service, researchers found anger spreads significantly faster on social media than other emotions.
For marketers, the tendency for racing rage can lead to brand damaging uproars over customer service failings or poorly conceived tweets. As Jeremy Robinson Leon, chief operating officer at Group Gordon communications told Marketing, “When something can circulate in the blogosphere, on Facebook or Twitter so quickly, there is a risk that a story can be defined for you as a brand in mere minutes.”
The study looked specifically at Chinese consumers, but the social reaction to recent news stories in the U.S. and Canada, from Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s crack cocaine scandal to Verizon’s decision not enter the Canadian market and even the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman, show anger travels just as quickly on western social media.
Just this week the dating site Ione Chat and Facebook were raked over the coals when a Toronto-based copywriter noticed a Facebook ad for Ione Chat, a dating site, featured a picture of Rehtaeh Parsons, a teenager from Nova Scotia who committed suicide after an alleged sexual assault.
Within hours, Facebook Canada released a statement that it had banned Ione Chat as an advertiser, noting the image was not taken from Parsons’ Facebook profile and calling it a “gross violation” of its ad policy. However, the fact that news of the ad had traveled to Parsons’ family before Facebook was able to respond mere hours later shows just how fast anger spreads online.
To track online sentiment, many brands turn to services like Conversocial and Chatterbox that provide notifications when there is a surge of negative comments. By responding as quickly as possible, marketers are often able to circumvent anger from traveling further.
The Beihang University study follows a study published in 2011 in Psychological Science, in which Jonah Berger similarly concluded emotional stimuli, including anger and anxiety, boost social transmission, making information travel faster.
In order to effectively use social media as a marketing tool, and for marketers respond appropriately to what is said about their brand, Berger told Medical Xpress companies must understand how and why people share information online.
“Whether you’re a company trying to get people to talk more about your brand or a public health organization trying to get people to spread your healthy eating message, these results provide insight into how to design more effective messages and communication strategies,” he said.
Canadian beer brands on social media by the numbers
The analytics firm Antelope crunched the numbers on how well 23 beer brands are doing on Facebook, studying the likes, comments and shares on more than 5,000 posts published between July 2012 and July 2013. Here its boozy social report card.
• Biggest fan base: Molson Canadian, with 582,378 likes, followed by Budweiser, which has over 450,000 Canadian likes
• Highest engagement: Molson Canadian, The Beer Store and Muskoka, each eliciting a like, comment or share from 50% of its fans
• Most popular with men: James Ready Beer, which engaged with of 86% male fan base on Facebook
• Most popular with women: Molson Canadian, which engaged with 50% of both its female and male fans
• Loudest: Steam Whistle, which published an average of 45 posts per month
• Quietest: Sleeman, which published on average just 2.6 posts per month
Great customer service is great social marketing
Some of the best social media marketing happens offline. Great customer service often begets viral social hits for brands, like the Dairy Queen employee in Hopkins, Minnesota whose act of kindness to a customer landed on Reddit, a social news aggregator, and earned the brand coverage in the mainstream press.
When a cashier at the quick-service chain spotted a customer picking up a 20 dollar bill a blind man dropped, he asked the woman to return it. After she refused, he offered the blind man a bill from his own pocket to replace it, which was noticed by another customer who then wrote a letter applauding the employee that was photographed and uploaded to Reddit.
Once the photo became popular on Reddit, the story was picked up by a slew of popular news sites, including the Daily Mail and the Huffington Post.
