The Lunch Fight Between Food Babe and The Science Club

When we think of fights, we usually personalize the opposition in terms of individuals; David vs. Goliath, JFK vs. Khrushchev, Thor vs. Loki. This is natural but unusable in the age of social network. It is more useful, from a marketer’s perspective, to see the battle of consumer’s mind as network of influencers rather than individual influencers.

I recently became enamored with the fight between The Food Babe and The Science Babe, two food safety bloggers with distinctive different view. The Food Babe is militant and vocal, although I’m not convinced she understands the science she claims she’s using. Whereas the Science Babe has strong science grounding and is less gross to read than the Food Babe.

Rather than analyze the battle between The Food Babe and The Science Babe as individual vs. individual, I look at the conflict in terms of influence clusters.

This lists the influencers that are most associated with The Food Babe. Only Food, Inc can be said to be on her side, since Food, Inc reprints her article, so 9 out of 10 influencers in the Food Babe’s world is against her.

Source: QSearch Trend

For Science Babe, all ten of her influencers support her.

Source: QSearch Trend

What is clear is that 5 of the influencers in The Food Babe’s sphere of influence are Science Babe’s ideological comrades.  As far as network warfare goes, The Food Babe is isolated and unsupported, and in a prolonged ideological battle, the cluster of pro-science will out produce The Food Babe in content. This would present The Food Babe a challenge to grow her audience while keeping her existing audience engaged. Based on her provocation method of engagement, I would expect more outrage and more radical claim about food safety from the Food Babe.

The author Robin Jones Gunn, wrote in Coming Attractions, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” No one could deny the meteoric rise of the Food Babe as part of the social media phenomena, but she remains without much of a cohort, whereas The Science Babe has a healthy and diverse cluster of like-minded science writer thinking seriously and rigorously about food safety. The Food Babe is all by herself, and while she has a fine shouting voice, the calm voices of chorus in harmony can overpower any preacher in fury, and make the preacher look a fool.

Written by Roger Do

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Let the Brand-Buyer Beware

Photo Credit: David Lee (with photo remix)

I’m juvenile. I can never resist a good food fight, especially when it’s a bout between The Food Babe and The Science Babe, both are influential and vocal food safety bloggers. The Food Babe is pro-organic, anti-GMO, and characteristically influences her readers with questionable level of scientific backing, while the Science Babe is hard science with a hint of humor.

From charts dealing with Facebook post and like, we see The Science Babe gaining on The Food Babe. However, when we look at Share Count per Like, the pattern shows The Food Babe’s virality is consistent, despite her decreasing exposure.

Source: QSearch Trend

For brand that engages influencers to reach the business’ target audience, they must keep in mind the two archetypes of influencers, the promoter and the provocateur. From the Science Babe’s performance, we see occasional provocation but overall, the Science Babe is promoting sound science, with the occasional sensationalism. Where at The Food Babe’s provocation is near constant, as inferred by the spiking shares.

Source: QSearch Trend

The danger of the provocateur influencer is that, in order to maintain the same level of audience outrage, the influencer moves towards more dramatic and extreme rhetorics. However, the dramatic draws in new readers because of the novelty, while the extreme rhetorics pushes readers away. The result is an influencer relying on outrage and provocation, in the long run, find themselves in the fringe position. They usually have a stable core of supporters, but growth is difficult to achieve. This can easily be seen in The Food Babe’s message’s constant virality with declining exposure.

When engaging an influencer, a brand must take into the influencer’s stance and method of influence, else they risk brand impairment. It may be entertaining to hire influencers and watch the food fight, but the careless brands will usually end up with eggs on their faces.

Written by Roger Do

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Finding True North in the Forest and not Trip over the Trees

How many social networks are you on? It depends on where you are from, and the answer could be Facebook plus LinkedIn/Quora/Pinterest/Twitter/Instagram…. not to mention native forum popular in your region, or ultra-niche like expat networks. Being active on multiple social networks is common, almost a standard as having a cell phone and emails. Despite all the new social networks that keep popping up, most of us still open Facebook on our phones, check our friends’ status, and then leave massive digital footprint on Facebook, either directly, or through one of the other services, which is connected to Facebook anyway.

It’s incredible how deeply we are attached to Facebook. This degree of umbilical linkage was unimaginable when Facebook launched 10 years ago. While Facebook is no longer cool and exciting, and may not be the one generating the buzz these days, it is still the place where all the viral content goes in the end, no matter where those viral content came from. When a technology no longer excites, that’s when it has taken root in our life. No one is excited about emails, but no one can deny email’s power in our work life.

Like the gold/blue/white costume post came from Buzzfeed, or the release of Apple Watch and the New Macbook, we can eventually find something regarding those on Facebook. Thus, for marketing people restricted with time and resources to monitor all social networks, choosing Facebook is the most reasonable and effective option. If a piece of news can’t be found on a platform which serves 1.4 billion users, it can hardly be called viral to be honest.

Moreover, Facebook has the most robust audience response system (a workable balance between the depth of an email and the shallowness of a tweet). It is this audience feedback that makes Facebook such a valuable tool for marketers, politicians, and virtually everyone who seeks to understand and influence the world.

To help organize those fire hydrant of information into usable drinking fountain, QSearch helps users monitor, analyze, and determine a course of action. When Ben Crox of Hong Kong wanted to understand his digital world of HK media, he used QSearch to search for pattern to investigate. In this report, Ben thoroughly analyzed influences of each news media in HK over Facebook with ease. With visually comprehensible chart and intuitive user interface, every one can visualize the footprint in the digital snow and find their own path.

Written by Tien-Yu Lee & Roger Do

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Je suis Palin

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

In the aftermath of the the slaying of the French satirists, collectively known as Charlie Hedbos, the global netizen’s response was to adopt Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) tag, photos, t-shirts to show solidarity with the right of free speech. While Je suis Charlie remains the most influential Facebook group in this respect, the second most powerful global influencer is a left field surprise. More influential than Fox News, Daily Mails, Huffington Post, or even L’Express, is Sarah Palin's use of the issue to attack Barack Obama’s absence from the public parade of world leaders.

Source: QSearch Trend

While Sarah Palin’s post was not influential over time, its one day attack had 96K likes and one out of three readers shared the article. Her ability to engage and influence is vastly greater than the established media outlet. The comparison between Fox News and Sarah Palin is particularly interesting because both influencers have similar influential profile; provocation.

The traditional method of measuring influence is to look at the ‘Likes’ each group has. Fox News has 10 million Likes. Sarah Palin has 4.4 million Likes. Under the old “more Like equals more influence” worldview, we expect Fox News to have twice the influence of Palin. But Fox News only has 73K likes, and 10K shares. One out of 13 shared, vs 1 out of 3 for Palin. Clearly, Palin has a much higher quality audience than Fox News, despite her audience is only half of Fox News’.

Before advance metric are available, advertisers would settle for group with the larger audience number. With advance analytics such as QSearch, we can now measure the quality of the audience, that includes engagement level of a group, multiply by its group size, and the secondary transmission of its sharing.

Before engaging an influencer to promote your message, measure the intensity of their audience. Social media is evolving to the the point where the quality of the audience is measurable and sometimes more important than the quality of the influencer.

Mark Twain had a great saying, “It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.” When you can measure both the size of the dog and the size of the fight, you can confidently decide which one to apply the lipstick to.

Written by Roger Do

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