Social media boycotts put analytics data to the test as CEOs weigh responses

• Brands facing calls for boycott on social media are under pressure to respond quickly.
• The playbook for handling social media backlash is changing, rooted in more complex data analysis.

On July 9, 2020, Goya Foods CEO, Robert Unanue, praised President Donald Trump in a speech at a White House event. His remarks quickly ignited a backlash on social media, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others denouncing the remarks on Twitter and calling for a boycott. Supporters of the president like Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted support for the company, and Trump himself posed for a photo with Goya products.

The Goya CEO stood his ground, and said he would not apologize for his remarks. Given the boycott furor, one might assume Goya sales would plummet. Or, perhaps, the opposite would happen, and the company would recruit a whole new customer base that would swell its sales.

A new study shows that neither of those scenarios occurred. Sales of Goya products did not decline, but grew briefly by as much as 22%. But that net increase was not sustained.

"Despite significant buzz around the Goya scandal, we find that its effect on sales was modest and only lasted for a few weeks, suggesting that both the risks and benefits to a firm of engaging in political discourse may be overblown," stated the report, which was authored by professors from Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Imperial College, London.

As political polarization has become even more pervasive in society, brands may find themselves, consciously or otherwise, drawn into political debates that prompt calls for boycotts on social media.

CEOs and other executives, like Unanue, will have to make decisions about how they should respond — if at all — when social media sentiment seems to be galvanizing against your brand.

Traditional analytics is no longer enough

Conventional wisdom about social crises is to mount a rapid response in order to stem the backlash. But there are other strategies for managing these situations that deeper data analysis can support.

"Social media analysis is not always straightforward, and the standard metrics we've been using for the last ten years aren't enough," said Ethan Bauley, head of innovation in North America at Weber Shandwick, a global communications agency.

Bauley said he has been looking at the ways that social platforms, as well as the analytics platforms themselves, can be "gamed" to convey distorted perspectives on how issues are resonating.

"Creating the illusion of support for things, getting things trending in a way that's not completely authentic is something that has been obviously tested out and perfected by a variety of different actors over the last several years," he said.

"Those same kinds of techniques and tactics can affect what clients see in a social media dashboard that's giving you a line chart about how many mentions there are of a certain phrase or keyword."

As the line chart goes up, c-suite leaders consider options for responding. But Bauley says that's when companies need to look deeper at the data, which Weber has been doing in collaboration with a data intelligence company called Blackbird.AI.

"If you're able to look a little bit deeper using some new kinds of metrics and methodologies that we've been developing," he said. "You can actually get more quickly underneath those things, and see, actually, is this actually being kind of manufactured? Is this an echo chamber that's getting really excited about an issue, because it's a proof point in some bigger agenda for them?"

Bauley gave an example of a client that was facing calls on social media to boycott its products over a global geopolitical issue, about which the company felt it was being misrepresented.

Leveraging insights from Blackbird.AI analysis, the team found that while the response to the issue was sizable and growing, it was essentially contained within an echo chamber of activists, but not resonating beyond that.

The first impulse for the company leaders was to, in common social parlance, "join the conversation," and explain their position in response to the social chatter. The input from the data analysis led them to predict that the spike would not extend beyond the core, albeit large, activist group, and the company elected to take a wait-and-see approach.

In fact, the spike did rapidly subside and there were no perceived repercussions for the brand.

This type of analysis does not come from only one source. It's tied to a deeper, ongoing understanding of the company's stakeholders, over time. "Organizations need new kinds of expertise in social sciences, politics, crisis management, and media to understand the "why" behind a social post," said Bauley. "This background — and the insights that result from it — will help organizations make better decisions."