Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: Do Your Social Media Posts Feed the Trolls?

Starting point is 00:00:00 We have some all-hands-on-deck agency commitments today, so no regular episode. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. But in its place, some new marketing research

Starting point is 00:00:32 about brands and online toxicity. There's lots to consider when you're crafting a social media post. Is this a good image? Am I using the right hashtags? Is the voice and tone good? Well, add one more thing to think about. Whether it will inflame the trolls and cause increased toxicity on your social channels.

Starting point is 00:00:53 Marcelo Nepomuceno is an Associate Professor of Marketing at HEC. That's the business school at the University of Montreal. He joins me now. Dr. Nepomuceno, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. How did you define toxicity, first of all? Well, the way we define toxicity is basically any post that has a very negative content connotation.

Starting point is 00:01:14 And to measure it, we use the Perspective API, which is basically an API created by Google that measures toxic comments in the comments section in a social media context, for instance. So it's looking for keywords like crappy, mad, angry, that sort of thing. All the words that you're not supposed to teach your kids, yes. Right. What did you set out to study? So initially, our study was to, I mean, I will take a step back of going to studies that I did before this one. So basically at the beginning, real beginning, was trying to understand what drives engagement online

Starting point is 00:01:50 in a social media context. What type of content should you post to maximize your engagement? Because we know from the literature, the engagement will drive sales, will drive a lot of other important KPIs, right? So at that moment, I was looking at three types of content that we study. So basically we're looking at contents that we call a social dimension. So those are basically contents

Starting point is 00:02:12 that are trying to create a social connection with the audience, okay? We have quality dimension, which will try to demonstrate the quality of the product or service that you're offering to your customer. And you have the selling dimension. So you're trying to sell something either indirectly or directly, very explicitly.

Starting point is 00:02:29 And then we also try to tag what they're trying to sell. So initially, I was trying to study that. That was one paper that I think we're not going to talk about it today. But that motivated me then to study this paper, which was trying to see how can you avoid toxicity. Because the mentality that I had when I was doing this study was how can I

Starting point is 00:02:54 avoid toxicity because there is all this literature saying that negative word of mouth, toxicity being one example of it, will have negative impacts for your brand, for your image, etc. So we're trying to see what content, what type of content in the post itself may generate more or less toxicity so you could avoid it. So that was what I had in mind in the beginning.

Starting point is 00:03:15 And what did you learn? So basically, we had some very, very interesting insight that we had is that we have, out of those three dimensions, right? We found that social dimension increases toxicity. Okay. So whenever the marketer is trying to create a social connection with the audience, right? Trying to bond, trying to create some sort of social connection with the audience in the post itself, that generates more toxicity.

Starting point is 00:03:42 Can you give me an example of a kind of post like that? That might be something I'm guessing like, I don't know, what are your plans this weekend? Post it here in the comments. Yeah, it's very much related to the way that the post is written. But it can have like bonding. So you try to create a social bond connection. You can have like social spotlight.

Starting point is 00:04:02 So this is a study that was done in the video game community. So you have a gamer who has just got this achievement in the game, he posted something, and then you have this award that you really put in that particular player in the social spotlight for the whole community.

Starting point is 00:04:19 So this is the type of things that you're trying to really you're acting as if you are their friends, as if the brand itself is the friend of the user, of the consumer. Like that's the tone of the social post. And that generates more negative comments. Yes. And I think when you think about internet trolls, it makes a lot of sense, right? What do we know about internet trolls?

Starting point is 00:04:40 Internet trolls are those people who feel pleasure when you look at studies in psychology. What motivates trolling? One of the big motivations of trolling is the pleasure is sadism, basically. It's a pleasure that they feel when they are creating havoc in a community. And the social post is when the content creator is really trying to connect with the audience. So it's a perfect setting to create this havoc because some people are going to be very attached to that brand and they come with toxic content and that creates just fight within the group, right?

Starting point is 00:05:12 And we get pleasure out of it. So that covers off the social type of posts, but there were two other types of posts? Yes. So the other one is quality. So basically when you're trying to demonstrate the quality of your product. So in this case, we're talking about the game industry, so we're looking at the features of the game,

Starting point is 00:05:30 descriptions of what you can do in the game, immersion of the game, culture, lore, and this kind of stuff. So everything that is related to quality also generated more toxicity. So this is basically the same logic. So they are going on, going, they are going on, uh, uh, it's a way to, to attack the community because it's attacking the brand. It's attacking what the qualities of that particular game. Right. And then people are going to react and there you go, you start having infighting. Right. And then the third dimension is what we call selling dimension. So this is when the company

Starting point is 00:06:05 is trying to sell something, right? And so they're trying to sell the product. They have maybe a promotion. Maybe they have, you're trying to convince people

Starting point is 00:06:15 to buy the game somehow. Okay? That's when trolling does not happen, when toxicity does not happen. So that's when this, that selling dimension happens, toxicity is reduced.

Starting point is 00:06:27 Okay. Of course, I need to just highlight one important aspect of our method is that we don't, we do not tag only one out of those contents. We may have a post that have multiple contents

Starting point is 00:06:37 at the same time. Okay. And I'm simplifying the story a little bit here because out of those three dimensions, we had sub-dimensions. So we had 20 different sub-dimensions that we go over in the paper. But just to simplify a little bit here because out of those three dimensions they had we had sub dimensions so we had 20 different sub dimensions that we go over in the paper but just to simplify a little bit we we we grouped them into three big dimensions to make it a little bit easier to communicate

Starting point is 00:06:54 findings your research as you mentioned focused on the video game space i'm a gamer i can be toxic my siege kd is 0.5 so i can very toxic. Do you think you'd have had different results if you'd have studied it in a different category, like online commerce? I haven't done online commerce. I've done it in some other industries as well, such as music industry. I've done it as well in the food industry.

Starting point is 00:07:19 And what's the other one? I blank now. But anyways, in the music industry, it's the one that I'm studying a lot now, and we have very similar results in terms of toxicity impact on final behavior. So on this study that we're talking about today, we did find that toxicity increased product usage,

Starting point is 00:07:37 meaning that when you have more toxicity, people play the game more, right? But in the music industry, what we had, what we found as well, this is not published yet, so I'm just giving you a bit of an insight of another study that I'm conducting now, is that we saw that toxicity increased sales of music artists. So there is some sort of I mean, when I got data of sales data, I managed to see this positive impact of toxicity on real consumer

Starting point is 00:08:03 behavior. That surprises the hell out of me. Like everything I think that we're taught in marketing school is that, I mean, other than the all news is good news comment, which I don't think is particularly accurate, but maybe it is. What do you think is behind that? That an increased level of toxicity could actually benefit the brand? It's a very good question. I'm actually doing some follow-up studies. We're going now to the lab. We're trying to do experiments with real consumers

Starting point is 00:08:31 to try to understand what's going on. I have a few hypotheses that I can give you. I cannot really tell you what's going on because I'm not sure yet. But one possible hypothesis is simply the algorithm that are behind those social medias, right? So in this study was done with Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. So it may be that toxicity itself generates more engagement, and we have some evidence for that in our data.

Starting point is 00:08:57 So the more there is toxicity, the more you get comments. The more a particular post gets comments, more people are going to see that game, are going to see that post, are going to be exposed to that game. The same thing goes to music artists, right? More people are going to be exposed to a particular post from a particular artist, and that greater exposure leads to more play, playtime, or to more sales of the music artist, right?

Starting point is 00:09:21 So it may be that, maybe something behind the algorithm, but it may be something more psychological that's going on. And if it's psychological, there are two hypotheses that I'm studying now with my graduate students. So one of them is basically a self-defense mechanism by the community. Like thinking on an individual level, when you have a troll or someone in the community being very aggressive, very toxic, it is not only that game that is being attacked. You are a gamer, you may know this, right?

Starting point is 00:09:50 Once you're really into a particular game and you are part of that social media community, attacking that game, it's not only attacking the game itself, it's attacking you as well. Because you get so invested in that game, playing for so long. Same thing for an artist, right? You get so invested on that artist that once that artist is attacked, it's as if your own identity is attacked, right? So as a way to defend your ego, to defend your identity, you end up playing more or buying more songs, right? It may be that that's going on. It's simply the community that infighting is driving people to defend themselves and play more, to reaffirm that identity.

Starting point is 00:10:31 And then there is then a third hypothesis here, which is basically, maybe there is also some sort of compassion going on here. So consumers may be feeling some sort of compassion towards the brand or towards the game itself, right? And down there, that compassion is driving them to play or to buy the music. Your data set was from 2016 to 2018. Obviously, online communities morph over time. How do you think your findings would have differed if you'd have had access to more recent data? Something that I'm very curious about is to see the TikTok era type of data.

Starting point is 00:11:04 And I think it would be interesting to see, there is some studies already, academic studies looking at that to try to content analyze content of videos, right? And I think that that will be a very interesting avenue of research. But looking at, I mean, how much has it changed from 18 to 23,

Starting point is 00:11:24 I think that big question mark for me would be also how the algorithm may have an impact on the findings. Because the algorithms are really black boxes that we do not have access to. So we don't know to what degree the findings we have are based on the algorithm or based really on the content themselves. Another one that's a big factor that I do not have as a control variable is

Starting point is 00:11:47 whether that particular post was paid or not paid that may increase the performance of engagement and so on and so forth. I know you didn't

Starting point is 00:11:56 study those, but what does your gut tell you? I think, of course, if the post is paid, you're going to get a better performance.

Starting point is 00:12:03 So I would, I mean, I would love to have data, access to data of companies that actually paid, not paid, you're going to get a better performance. So I would love to have access to data of companies that actually pay, not paid. And then you can put that in the model as a control variable and see how many clicks that you're going to get from a paid post. And then you can interact paid posts with certain contents, right? See how those two things together make increase or decrease sale.

Starting point is 00:12:30 It might also be interesting. I mean, one of the things you can get out of at least the meta ad managers are the reactions, right? The like, angry, laughing, happy, those sorts of things. Might be interesting to see if there's a correlation there between people who express a negative thing, like the angry reaction emoji, and that actually ends up, you know, however, that's a question for another future paper. It's a good idea. I mean, it's something that in the beginning, when they came up with those emojis, people were not really engaging that much on that. But now I think people are more used to it. So more recent data would be interesting to analyze that, yes. I would actually really like access to that for an ad placement point of view.

Starting point is 00:13:12 You know, if you sold, I don't know, running shoes, to be able to target people who reacted angrily to your competitor's shoes would be kind of interesting. But I don't think we're getting that anytime soon. What surprised you the most about your findings? I think what surprised me the most was what surprised you as well, which was basically the impact of toxicity, the positive impact of toxicity on product usage. And the analysis that we did was basically looking at how long the toxicity has a positive or negative impact on usage. And we looked at the impact

Starting point is 00:13:48 up to 10 days. And we saw that the impact was positive during 10 days. That means that if you post something today, there is a spike or increase, there is a proxy post today by a user, increases usage, product usage during 10 days. So you can see for how long that impact takes place, and we can see that that impact lasts for 10 days. It's quite impressive when you think about it.

Starting point is 00:14:14 So it's quite counterintuitive as well, because as we were saying before, we teach our students to avoid negative word of mouth, to avoid negative content, right? And basically what we see is that the results the first impression that we have when you see those results is that we should actually try to embrace the trolls because they are helping the trend in some way. Having said that, that's not my main recommendation for

Starting point is 00:14:39 this study. I don't think that's what we should do necessarily. I think we need a little bit more data to make sense of what's going on. So social posts, product info posts all attract more trolls. Sales posts don't. Do we just drop the social and product posts? I think the key message here for marketers, what they should do differently would be to reduce selling as much as possible. Because selling, it has a negative impact on engagement.

Starting point is 00:15:11 That means you're going to get less likes, less comments. It has a negative impact on trolling, and it also has a negative impact on product usage. Wait a minute. Sales posts, I thought, maybe I'm misunderstanding here. I thought sales posts reduced the trolls and toxicity. Yes, that's it. So when you have posts about selling, that reduces toxicity, but it also reduces engagement in general. I see. Such as likes and comments and things like that. And it has a negative relationship also with product usage, a direct relationship with product usage that is negative. So really, any way you look at it, it has a negative impact through toxicity and through

Starting point is 00:15:50 a straight impact on product usage. Which in a way makes a lot of sense. People are not on social media to be sold. They are there to engage with their community, with their friends, and to engage with the brand to know what's up, to know what's new, right? So selling in itself has a negative impact with only one exception. When you have posts that are about sales promotion, okay? So click here to buy 50% off kind of thing, you know? Then you have a positive impact. But if it's just trying to push sales and trying to just convince people to buy, that doesn't help.

Starting point is 00:16:28 You had co-authors on your paper? Who were they? Yes, of course. I shouldn't mention that. I had Tolga as a co-author here from HSC. He's a professor in finance. I have Laurent Charlin, who is also a colleague here at HSC. He's an expert in machine learning. And I had another MSc student who also was a co-author. He's from Concord University.

Starting point is 00:16:53 Well, it's fascinating research. I'm delighted you were able to share it with us. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Dr. Marcelo Nepomuceno is an associate professor of marketing at HEC. That's the business school at the University of Montreal. His paper was published a couple of business school at the University of Montreal. His paper was published a couple of weeks ago in the Journal of Interactive Marketing.

Starting point is 00:17:14 It's called Should We Feed the Trolls? Using Marketer-Generated Content to Explain Average Toxicity and Product Usage. It is an open access paper, and you can read the whole thing for free at b.link slash trollstudy. And that will do it for us for the week. Today in digital marketing is produced by Engage Q Digital on the traditional territories of the Tsunamic First Nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is the intrepid Steph Gunn. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild. Music licensing by Source Audio. Ad coordination by Red Circle.

Starting point is 00:17:46 And you know, not many people know this, but our theme composer, Mark Blevis, was the first person kicked off Twitter once Elon bought it. He didn't post anything bad. He just tweeted that he wouldn't buy the blue checkmark. I mean, who can blame him? Canadian exchange rate, man.

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Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: Do Your Social Media Posts Feed the Trolls?

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