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A trend emerges in Social Media

Hello, my name is Kate and I have been working at Cymfony for just over a year.  In that time you could say that I have become the go-to person for all of our food clients.  It started with a simple project looking at peanuts and now has exploded to bars, crackers, and most recently cereal.  Throughout this time spent knee deep in food discussion, Jim Nail has been consistently asking me to blog about some of my findings.  Not wanting to bore you with talk about inulin (a particular form of fiber) and high fructose corn syrup, I have been hesitant to put my thoughts on the subject out here until one very dominant trend emerged.

The topic of today’s reading will be on what I call ‘the weight watchers.’  These individuals are not necessarily in the Weight Watchers program, but they are consumers who regularly and learnedly discuss weight management on the web.   In every food study that I have worked on, whether it is about the intersection of food, health and wellness, or an investigation on why one cereal brand has been the most popular brand in the last twelve years, the weight watchers emerge as the dominant voice.

This group is made up of two large sub-groups: weight conscious women* and the body-building men.  Both of these groups are very conscious of what foods and which ingredients they put into their bodies.  Additionally, both groups keep avid food diaries, and in many cases, these are online journals.  The weight watchers have all been through tough times and have struggled to get to where they are.  They are an online community that is simply there for support and encouragement of the new members.

Discussions on food are quite different than discussions of other products that we analyze. Social media tonality for most of our clients is usually neutral**, but with all of our food clients to date, the tonality breakdown has been 80-90 percent positive.  The biggest reason for this is that weight watchers go online to offer advice and to educate, not to complain or ‘bash’ a brand or product.  Additionally, most of the discussion drivers*** for our food clients have also been positive.  This shows that the weight watchers are online advocating products.  This is the group’s most defining characteristic, with all of the things to complain about – high price, high calorie count, etc. weight watchers only comment on what they deem helpful to another blogger.  When comparing two similar products, a post will typically only explain why one product is preferred over the other, and not call attention to the lesser product’s flaws. 

We also see that discussions about food take place on a variety of sites, including general discussion sites and general health sites such as ivillage.com and answers.yahoo.com, as well as specialty weight loss sites you might expect like calorie-count.com.  This shows that food conversations online are diverse in topic and location.

                Next time I’ll talk about where health management fits into all of this and what those trends look like!

 

 

* With social media it is very difficult to discern age, gender and life stage.

** Meaning that a majority of the documents collected speak neither positively or negatively about a brand being tracked.

***Discussion drivers are the topics with the highest volume.  We look at a wide range of discussion drivers, including taste, recommend, price, health, etc.

Posted by Kate Kurtin on January 26, 2009 at 03:30 PM | Email this post Permalink

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