How to start a social and digital brand-risk monitoring program

Starting and running a business offers limitless opportunities to make positive economic and social impacts that benefit everyone – your customers, your colleagues - or employees - and other stakeholders. Running a business also means exposure to risks of all sorts. These include product risks such as safety problems, fitness for purpose, negative product quality trends; legal risk from dissatisfied customers, employees, or regulators; and reputational risks around company communications, marketing, customer service issues, employee behavior, and the broad spectrum of business practices and processes that are needed to get a product to market. Intelligently designed, consistently applied, and iterative social media monitoring will help you stay in front of emerging threats and possibly head-off bigger problems before they become larger.

Risk management is not just for comms teams

In general, we associate the value of risk monitoring as being assigned to corporate communications and legal teams, both of which I have worked directly with. But beyond that, today’s silo-breaking organizations means that brand teams and leaders across the enterprise need to be in the loop, too, at least at the information awareness level. In every case, awareness should shape coordinated tactics and strategies.

How should you, as an analyst, get started? A first step is to define the potential exposures your business has to your customers and business partners. I’ll use Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream (because ice cream is easy for most of us to conceptualize and Ben & Jerry’s is often used in social platform demos) as an example. You need not be an expert in ice cream, or the food industry, but it’s surprising how much can be found with the application of just a few hours of initial research. If you’re an internal business partner or trusted external resource, you have the added benefit of working with teams that can help you identify risks that aren’t immediately apparent.

Use Boolean search queries to monitor your brand

If you’re using Boolean search, set up your primary brand, company, and personnel keywords:

("ben & jerry's" OR "ben and jerry's" OR ben&jerrys OR benandjerrys OR #benandjerrys OR "ben cohen" OR "bennet cohen" OR "jerry greenfield" OR @benandjerrys OR @yobencohen)

Our risk awareness terms are the modifiers you use that is organized depending on how you may want to segment the discussion.

Ben & Jerry’s has products with intimate connections to customers: Their product is eaten. Assume that food borne illnesses are a product safety, reputational, and legal risk.

Product safety: You can start with a list of pathogens that could be present in dairy products and continue with the regulators responsible for food safety:

Brucellosis

“e. coli”

Listeria

Recall

U.S.D.A.

“department of agriculture”

FDA

“food and drug administration”

We also know that Ben & Jerry’s is a big brand name under the globalized Unilever corporate parent. That makes them a large target for the type of actions that any brand is subjected to that are evergreen in social and digital risk monitoring:

Legal mentions

Lawsuits

Court filings

Depositions

Boycotting/Divestitures/Sanctions

Boycott

Divest

If there are specific industry concerns you should add them. This would be specific to Ben & Jerry’s dairy processing business.

Taxpayers & Subsidies: Agriculture in the USA is highly subsidized, hence much of their profit could arguably be considered as subsidized by taxpayers. So versions of these terms should be considered:

Subsidy

Taxpayers

Ben & Jerry’s occupies a deliberate space among food brands as a B Corporation and promulgating progressive political values and highly publicized business and supply chain processes.

Political Culture: I dislike bringing this up, but conspiracists will make nationalistic, antisemitic, or otherwise ignorant associations that must be considered:

Soros

Gates

Greenwash

Cancel

Brand Values: Ben & Jerry’s promotes corporate values in support of human and workers’ rights but these should also be viewed in the context of risk:

Fairtrade

child (or slave) labor

Trans, LGBTQ+ people

Human rights

Workers’ rights

And there are always the unknowns. How do you find what you aren’t looking for? Sometimes unknowns can show up along with other keywords, boycott being a good example. More often your consistent application of monitoring will sensitize you to emerging risk areas. I found these international concerns in the research prepping this article:

International: These can be added as standalone terms because of Ben & Jerry’s controversial social discussion on where they choose to conduct business

Russia

Israel

Building the right Boolean query can be complex

This is the result if all the above were put into one query. It’s far from exhaustive and experience could suggest more additions. I’ve used a wildcard (*) liberally. Your Boolean might vary:

("ben & jerry's" OR "ben and jerry's" OR ben&jerrys OR benandjerrys OR #benandjerrys OR "ben cohen" OR "bennet cohen" OR "jerry greenfield" OR @benandjerrys OR @yobencohen)

AND

(

("ben & jerry's" OR "ben and jerry's" OR #benandjerrys OR "ben cohen" OR "bennet cohen" OR "jerry greenfield" OR @benandjerrys OR @yobencohen)

AND

<<<Food Safety>>>

((fda OR "f.d.a." OR "food and drug administration" OR "department of agrigulture" OR "agriculture department" OR usda OR "u.s.d.a." OR recall* OR #recall* OR diarrhea* OR "food poisoning" OR brucella OR brucellosis OR "bacillus cereus" OR "campylobacter jejuni" OR "c. jejuni" OR "coxiella burnetii" OR "c. burnetti" OR "e. coli" OR "e coli" OR listeria OR listeriosis OR "mycobacterium avium" OR"m. avium" OR "mycobacterium bovis" OR "m. bovis" OR salmonella OR "staphylococcus aureus" OR "s. aureus" OR yersinia OR toxi*)

OR

<<<Legal Mentions>>>

(suing OR sued OR sues OR lawsuit OR "class action" OR #classaction OR filing OR

"district court" OR "federal court" OR "court room" OR "state court" OR deposition OR (serv* NEAR/2 paper*))

OR

<<<Boycott, Divest, Sanction>>>

(boycott OR #boycott OR divest* OR #divest* OR sanction* OR #sanction*)

OR

<<<Taxpayers & Subsidies>>>

(subsid* OR "tax pay*" OR #taxpayer*)

OR

<<<Political Culture/Conspiracy>>>

(soros OR gates OR woke OR greenwash* OR #greenwash* OR leftist OR "left leaning" OR "cancel ben & jerry's" OR "cancel ben" OR "cancelben&jerrys" OR #cancelbenandjerrys)

OR

<<<Human & Worker's Rights>>>

("child labor" OR "child labour" OR #childlabor OR #childlabour OR enslave* OR "slave labor" OR "slave labour" OR #slavelabor OR #slavelabour OR fairtrade OR "fair trad*" OR #fairtrad* OR "unfair trad*" OR #unfairtrad* OR "human rights" OR #humanrights OR trans OR #trans OR transgender OR #transgender OR lgbtq* OR #lgbtq*)

OR

<<<International Mentions>>>

(russia OR israel OR gaza OR #russia OR #israel OR #gaza OR palestin* OR #*palestin* OR "west bank" OR westbank OR #westbank)

)

NOT

(rugby OR "Getty Images by Ben")

With a big Brand like Ben & Jerry’s, you might get one hundred or more fresh hits every day.

You can segment them based on your modifiers for a high-level overview of the risk footprint like these:

‍

Data Source: Brandwatch Consumer Research

Reviewing your results manually is crucial

The most important step is to read each one. Reviewing a hundred daily mentions for a big brand is a reasonable use of time. With familiarity, it doesn’t take very long. All of them should be relevant (meaning they are true positives for your search) but not all are urgently actionable. Some lack of precision is okay to ensure a wide net. Over time you add new keywords, you might drop or modify some that are irrelevant, and add new exclusions as they are discovered.

‍

Brandwatch's Mention List component.

You will learn who and what detractors associate a brand, their values, and their actions with. Over time, this informs your ability to deliver insightful analysis and recommendations during times of crisis that add value far beyond the daily and weekly monitoring reports.

What is actionable and when should it be reported? Under normal conditions, the biggest brands should monitor daily, and report at least weekly. Something new that hasn’t been seen before, especially around imminent safety risks to your customers, personnel, or property should be escalated immediately. How to report and escalate issues, for example who to notify and when to notify, depends on your company’s or client’s crisis management or risk mitigation action plans. That document, if it doesn’t already exist, is essential for any business and should include the social and digital intelligence monitoring and reporting component.

‍