Caution: Tweets are further from reality than they appear

Since the dawn of social media social listening has been touted as the panacea for many a marketers problem. Consumer insights? Look at their tweets. Brand health? Count the number of likes you get. Product feedback? Ask the Facebook community. And perhaps the most frustrating of the bunch: Don’t have the budget for a focus group? Have a look at Twitter and see what you can dig up. 

And indeed, on those occasions when your boolean query is well written and your objectives precise, social listening can be used intelligently to unpick genuine consumer behaviour to great success. One example that stands out comes from L’oreal - who have plugged social insight to their product innovation cycle, scraping 5.2 million conversations across 6 months to identify 28 micro-trends in the beauty category. Various sources from professional make-up artists, beauty enthusiasts and image recognition software were used to identify upcoming trends such as the #CutCrease, as well as the nuance behind it like how and when different markets were adopting it. These insights were then hand delivered to the product innovation and marketing teams to help consumers achieve them with L’oreal products ahead of the rest of the marketplace

But not all applications of social intelligence are equally good at showing genuine insight, especially when cognitive biases are at play which cause the negative side of the conversation to unjustly be perceived as the brands biggest problem to solve thanks to that 1% of auto-coded negative sentiment.  

Bud Light’s Special Delivery spot in this year’s Super Bowl is perhaps an example of where social listening has made a mountain out of a molehill. Many were baffled when the Game of Thrones parody showed a misplaced corn syrup delivery being dragged from Budweiser to Millers to Coors, looking for the owner. Whilst the creative idea and execution here was stop on, you can’t help but question whether corn syrup really was the single biggest barrier to purchasing Bud Light for the majority of their potential audience? It’s all too easy to see how two slides of verbatim tweets from impassioned corn syrup activists declaring “American beer has corn syrup, ew, gross” could be persuasive evidence that this single issue should be the crux of their biggest marketing push of the year.  

And when you start looking, evidence of misguided campaigns aren’t difficult to spot. Recently McDonald's convinced themselves that people are hell-bent on the controversial topic of putting bacon in a Big Mac (they’re not), firing off a debate reassuring them that a Big Mac with bacon is indeed still a Big Mac.

Coke similarly, in their much critiqued millennial campaign Because I Can, allowed themselves to become fixated on the idea that their millennial target audience felt guilty about drinking Diet Coke. Type “guilt” and “Diet Coke” into Twitter, because that’s of course where all millennials are expressing their true self, and indeed you will see people sharing their guilt in getting a Diet Coke from McDonalds on the way to work as a naughty treat. Pull a selection of these together plus some generational research on the trend for authentic experiences and it’s not hard to see how an athleisure wearing millennial reassuring us that “If you want to a Diet Coke, have a Diet Coke” could quickly start to appear like a good idea.

The thinking behind these campaigns hark back to David Ogilvy’s much-quoted observation of market research, that “People don't think what they feel, don't say what they think and don't do what they say". Perhaps it’s worth adding that they don’t tweet what they really think either.