Luca vs Boycotters. How web monitoring made the attack ineffective

This is the story of Luca (not his real name) and how he managed to stop a competitor from boycotting his company. Luca is a passionate professional who carries out his work with an innovative spirit and an eye for innovation.

After working in the personal care sector, Luca became marketing director of a food company about a year ago. In his new role, in addition to coordinating a team of around 50 professionals to develop integrated communication plans, he is faced with a new challenge.

During a routine meeting with the team to analyse the trend of posts on Twitter, Luca noticed that some indicators were changing: in particular, he noticed a variation in the sentiment of Tweets.

He decides with the team to investigate further and starts reading some of the tweets. It immediately became clear that a specific ingredient contained in the products was being mentioned very frequently, which was not appreciated by the public opinion for ecological reasons.

On Twitter, rumours are being created around this ingredient highlighting its use by the company, even though this was not actually the case. They fear it is a boycott. Luca then organised a new discussion with the team to try to understand the implications of this situation and find a solution. During the meeting, one of his collaborators suggested using a company specialised in web monitoring and sentiment analysis.

After a search on the Internet and after considering various methodologies, Luca decided to rely on a company that has a multi-patented platform based on self-learning for content analysis. The choice fell on this company because the platform is able to carry out analyses in a short time and provides dynamic dashboards on the progress of the search.

From an initial analysis, the company confirmed the boycott action and in less than a month showed Luca and his team the results of the monitoring. Indeed, in recent weeks, the content shared on Twitter was almost exclusively about the offending ingredient, and the data showed a greater increase in negative or very negative sentiment than positive (even about 10% of users showed a feeling of anger about the use of this ingredient in Luca’s products).

Thanks to the data collected, Luca and his team were able to plan a communication strategy in response to this attack, mitigating the effect of the boycott action.