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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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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