Saturday Night Data: Participation in Social Good

Okay. I think we are live. Looks like the audio window is running. Tonight, uh Saturday night data, again, uh sort of inappropriate to use the term party, but one of the things I heard this week was uh people saying about brands that did not uh take a stand on the uh murder of George Floyd and the uh Black Lives Movement that for those brands who didn't say something, that uh your silence speaks volumes. And so I got to wondering how would we know?

I mean, there's a lot of brands out there. How would we know whether a brand did or did not uh take a stand other than like manually going one by one? Well, the good news is that uh there are ways to tell this through a lot of data mining. Um we're gonna start with gathering up uh the majority of the hashtags uh that were used. So let's look at the last 30 days.

This is using Talk Walker's interface. Okay. Next, we need Instagram data. I'm gonna pull a whole big pile of it. Hey Mike, good to see ya.

And this is going to take quite a bit of time, so because it's got to process uh the year to date amount of data. While we're waiting for that, let's go ahead and look at our hashtags. We have this sorted by total hits. Pull out that I want to focus really on pull out that because that's just stupid. Okay, this is this list here should be capturing the majority of those uh those social posts that we assume would be able to identify.

So let's put that in a text file for now over here, and we're gonna want to uh turn this into a comma separated value array. Now we have our Instagram data, it looks like it has finished loading. And I'm going to just check that our. So type convert did not do as it was supposed to do. So we need to start doing some cleanup, change that to the date created to a date field.

Good. Um we have here likes, comments, shares. There are no shares, so we need views. Good. And now what we want to do now is we want to identify did any of these brands use any of these tags for any reason whatsoever.

So let's do okay, we'll get rid of all this other stuff right now. We want to convert this to paste to a collapse. And that should do it, I think. Yes. So you can see there, it's now all one pipe delimited blob rejects ignore case is true.

Oops. We need to create a content field goals. Page zero title description. Good. Okay.

And now we have all of our major um information here. Let's do an arrange in descending order by our account here. And then do a transmute of our account. Username. Followers at posting.

Likes comments. Type and account. Okay, so we have like lush cosmetics here. Let's pull up the actual table here. Lush cosmetics.

Use eight of those tags. Uh Democ there's a bunch of stuff in here that looks pretty good. Let's do a quick save. Okay, and now let's do a split. We're gonna do a split into two pieces.

Filter than zero. I'll take that exact same. Filter this equals zero. So you know what I want to do? I want to actually do a summarize first.

So let's draw this down. We're gonna do a group by gonna do a group uh by the account name. There's a name type. And then we're gonna do a summarize on equal sum pictures. This is to be a mean because it's across data sets.

Followers of posting like sequels. Like SQLs. And get a little C T sum. Okay. This is going to now collapse and summarize this table.

It should. Okay. From the top. Now again, what we're doing here is we are taking this big collection of hundreds of thousands of posts, and ideally we're gonna boil it down to um just a few characteristics. I think I actually want to get rid of user name and type.

And just group on account so that I can do a distinct on it. So let's do that again. I changed my assigner, so it's no longer blowing things up. Good. So now we have we're down to essentially the unique number of accounts here.

And now if we split this as we were talking about earlier, we have three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one brand accounts. Oh I want to do a an array that a range again here. There we go. So we should see like ABC News was using a lot. There's tons of uh brands, Sky News mentioning it, Harper's Bazaar, Vivo, L Australia, Culture Kings, CNN, Vice.

Okay. Some not a couple of non-hashtag versions. Actually, you know what? I don't want to do that. And the reason I don't want to do that is using hashtag conveys intent that you're are posting and supporting this thing.

And it shows that it shows to a a fair amount what your alignment to this is. So let's leave this as is. We do our splits. So we have our vocal data frame. And let's do the let's do an a range on the silent data frame.

Followers at posting. Followers. Do the same for the vocal. Let's go check. I'm going to add that to the collection because I would argue that that is clearly a valid support.

Let's look the next one, Victoria's Secretary. So there's no hashtags whatsoever in this one. Uh so let's do that. Let's distinguish just didn't use hashtags, because I think that is uh a valid thing to look for and split out uh that's tough. So Kat's saying uh it would be interesting to look at how many of them refer to community all the time.

Yeah, that that would be fun. Um we can add that in community county. How do we tackle the victorious secret problem? Because they did respond to this, but it's not tagged in a way that would be easily identifiable. I guess at this point it would be one of those things where uh like Marvel Entertainment.

Or some image recognition, one of the two. Let's rerun this. Um would be useful. So let's do that. Some of the cause tags.

Hi, Ashley. So let's go ahead and put those in as well. There obviously are a lot of grants that spend a whole lot of time mentioning uh community. Love your melon. I don't know what that is.

So what we're now seeing is as we go through and identify uh in this case, you know, it is a because of the variety of the ways that people are uh speaking about this, it is different. Uh it is it is a a process to go through and look at all of these uh brands and see how they're addressing this. So uh Alliance, for example. So yeah, in Alliance case, they they did. They missed the boat completely.

Um the biggest question, so now what do we do? What do we do with this information? Uh there are obviously a lot of uh hey Joseph, there are a lot of brands here that are, uh, because this is an international list, uh, not necessarily uh going to participate in an American uh an American centric movement. Um so we would probably at some point want to try and weed those out. But it is funny to Kat's point earlier.

Look how many times, you know, alliances use community in their content, and then and yet when we checked out their profile, it was kinda nobody home for something that is clearly going to affect their business. So to the question of does a brand silence speak volumes. And the exercise we've done tonight is one that if you have access to data through the social media monitoring platform of your choice, you can start to see the process of filtering this out to see okay who is participating, who is not, who chose, like in the case of Alliance, not to say anything. And what does that say about them? Now, if you wanted to take this to um a how should I put this?

Katie Martell does this really really well, uh, is to then look at your your company. Um see, where is about us? I don't really want to look at your videos. There's your Instagram stuff, there's your people. And it is a valid question to then go and look and see just how well balanced is the executive suite.

Right? You have exactly one person of color, uh, I think possibly two, um, whose title is Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, but it's doesn't seem to be showing up anywhere else. Now, that's not to go after them specifically, but if this is a valid question. I don't know, you know, maybe communications professionals like you know, like Joseph who's watching could can chime in. Should you take a stand?

That's a company level question. Should you take a stand if you know the moment you some anyone goes to your about us page and sees a lack of diversity? Does that make you look worse than not saying anything at all? I think there are other cases where certainly, you know, uh, we saw some examples like the in with the Victoria's Secret. They have said here's what we're doing to address the the issue.

Um making, you know, significant financial contributions. And yes, to Kat's point, it would be very interesting to see uh this hashtag usage by these brands over time. Is it just a thing now? Or is it a thing that they stay committed to and keep promoting and keep uh sharing. But at the end of the day, it really does come down to looking at the data and seeing what people are talking about, how they're using uh their social channels and platforms.

Uh Joseph says, bottom line, a Board of Executive Leadership should mirror the consumers they serve. There you go. So thanks for watching, folks. Um I hope you found this in fate inf informative. Uh, the ability to essentially dig in to a lot of data all at once about what brands are doing and what they're saying.

And uh and I hope you use it, I hope you use these ideas in your own work for social good. Whatever it is that you are uh looking to do to make the world a better place, know that the data is out there, know that it is something that you can work with, and know that it is something that you can use to enact change. So if you are, for example, an alliance customer, you could communicate your dissatisfaction with their failure to lend a voice to uh this week's events. If you have follow up questions, you know, please leave them in the comments in the chat and stuff like that, and uh, or you know, drop us an email or whatever. But thanks for watching, we'll talk to you soon.

Take care, but