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by Henry Chapman on May 29, 2024
Detect, React, Protect
Much of the focus around social listening analysis is on examples of cheerful conversation, e.g., brand campaigns, messaging, and trust that went well. However, it's just as important to know where your brand needs to improve due to people’s tendency to repeat and discuss negative brand-related stories than more positive ones. Here is where a good social listening solution can shine - keeping tabs on your brand's weaknesses so you can react before they snowball into disaster.
With that in mind, we're thrilled to announce our latest tool for you: Infegy’s Brand Risk dashboard!
Using the Infegy Social Dataset, Brands at Risk algorithmically ranks the world's largest brands sourced from Forbes' Global 2000 by an overall score (see below), so you can see today's brands with the most room for improvement at a glance. Let's dive into the details so you can learn more about Brands at Risk.
The power ranking
Brands at Risk's central feature is its 30-day trailing power ranking, which charts the position of each of today's top 10 Brands at Risk. Because the chart looks back 30 days, brand strategists can use these metrics to determine when the online discourse about a brand got particularly bad or when a brand is beginning to see a worsening situation.
Figure 1: Brands at Risk Daily Power Ranking (April 2024 through May 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.
At the time of authorship, Boeing has been our top Brand at Risk over the last 30 days - this is no surprise as the aerospace manufacturer has endured scandal after scandal with unreliable parts, safety investigations, and passenger injuries.
On the other hand, while your brand might appear on Brands at Risk, it doesn't mean the brand will stay there forever. Microsoft peaked at position number 4 earlier in the month due to lawsuits and controversies about its OpenAI investment. However, Microsoft's position has improved steadily over the last two weeks. By late May, it's at position number nine and dropping fast.
Remember that this power ranking shows only the top 10 brands at risk. If you want to see where your brand ranks, contact us today to learn more.
Indicators, trend data, and top topics
Below the power ranking, we show trend data along our ranking algorithm's indicators and the brands' topics that comprise our list.
Figure 2: Trend data and indicators showing our top Brands at Risk (April 2024 through May 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.
Trend data
Trend-based volume and sentiment data are critical indicators for navigating brand crises. Any time we use social listening to analyze brands, trend-based data is usually our first stop to understand the brands' strengths and growth and the events that drove the underlying volume. Brands at Risk allows you to switch between volume and sentiment to see how people reacted to these brands' crises.
Our indicators
Along with trend data, we also incorporate various negative indicators generated by Infegy IQ, Infegy's in-house sentiment analysis and theme classification engine, powered by seventeen years of artificial intelligence and natural language processing research.
Our indicators incorporate both Infegy's Emotions and Themes. Emotions provide a more nuanced classification mechanism versus traditional sentiment analysis. We can detect nuanced negative emotions like Fear, Hate, Disgust, or Sadness. Our ranking methodology also incorporates Infegy's Themes. Themes classify conversation categories like posts about injuries, crimes, or customers wanting to churn.
Top topics
At its core, Infegy's natural language processing engine processes words and their aggregate meaning. Analysts return to those topics better to understand the most critical conversation around these brands.
Figure 3: Top Topics pertaining to Tyson Foods (April 2024 through May 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.
Brands at Risk allows you to do just that for each brand within our top ten. Scroll down to your brand of interest and click the red button. You'll see the topics (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) our algorithms have deemed the most important within the brands' conversations. We color them by sentiment and size them by relevance within the conversation so you can get a good idea of each brand's most significant stressor.
The formula
We incorporate each indicator discussed above into a formula that outputs a Brand Risk Indicator (BRI) score.
We'll display our formula here. Don't be disturbed by its length—it's just a weighted average of the sum of each indicator multiplied by our weight times the logarithm of the post volume.
Figure 4: Our Brand Risk Indicator Formula
Figure 5: Weights of Indicators used in our Brand Risk Indicator formula
We use logarithms here to normalize brands with outlier post volume. Our formula had to balance post volume with those negative indicators. Some giant brands on our list, like Amazon or Apple, have outsized post volume, which means regardless of their negativity, their overwhelmingly high post volume would always put them at the top of the ranking. We use the logarithm here to normalize that post volume to get a more balanced metric of smaller brands truly at risk.
The data pull
Remember, Brands at Risk updates automatically daily to pull the most relevant large brands in trouble worldwide. To update it daily, we use Infegy's Starscape API, which sends thousands of queries to our servers, calculates each BRI score, sorts each brand, formats the data as a JSON, and then posts the JSON to our web hosting service. Chat with an advisor today if you'd like to learn how your company can use social listening APIs to build a social data web application or dashboard.
Helping your brand move forward
Understanding and mitigating risks is just as crucial as celebrating successes in brand communications. Our Brands at Risk dashboard provides real-time insights into where your brand stands and how it is perceived, enabling you to react swiftly and strategically to missteps or crises. By leveraging our advanced social listening APIs and natural language processing engine, you can stay ahead of potential crises, ensuring your brand remains resilient and trusted.
Chat with an advisor today if you'd like to learn how you can use social listening data to protect your brand.