Nestlé, Greenpeace, trends and impact

By way of a quick follow-up to the Nestlé Facebook social media, I thought it might be worth seeing the impact of the whole affair on the Nestlé and Greenpeace brands, and on the issue of palm oil in KitKats. This is pretty basic stuff – I’m using Twitter as my search medium, just recording mentions. If anyone has the kit to do some up-to-date sentiment analysis, it would be great to see (though I can guess). This from Trendistic:

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Nestlé, Facebook and tone of voice

Less than 24 hours since it happened, there’s been plenty of coverage of Nestlé’s rather fatal decision to tell contributors to its Facebook fan page that their posts will be deleted if they use profile pics that are alterations of Nestlé logos or product. (The post was prompted by protests on the fan page about the use of palm oil in KitKat bars. See here for useful context.)

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Conversation analysis by iPhone

There’s a branch of linguistics called conversation analysis (CA) which, as its name suggests, analyses the dynamics of conversation. Whereas many areas of language study (including discourse analysis, of which CA forms a part) focus on language structures within individual utterances or texts, CA is useful for giving us insights into how language use defines and reflects the relationships between speakers. So CA focuses on aspects of speech like turn-taking, interruption and repair (e.g. repeating or clarifying when something is unclear), and making sense of their use as interpersonal tactics. For example, if I’m constantly interrupting you and not letting you get a word in, that’s a pretty aggressive strategy to assert my status. If I’m constantly deferring to you, I’m acknowledging your status. If you say something stupid and I just sit there and look at you, well, you know you’ve said something stupid. And so on.

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St Patrick and the prescriptivists

17 March was St Patrick’s Day, and this obviously led to an upswing of online chatter about the fifth-century Romano-British snake-chaser.

On Twitter, Marcus Campbell (@scronide) noticed, and remarked, that a lot of US tweeters were referring to St Patrick as ‘St Patty’, in contrast to ‘Paddy’, the commoner abbreviation in British and Irish English. In response, he set up paddynotpatty.com, a light-hearted site campaigning against the use of the ‘Patty’ abbreviation. As the site announces in big white type: Read the rest of this entry »

All for the love of Marmite (and Latin)

Have you heard of the Marmarati? They are, notionally, the secret society of fanatical Marmite lovers, the chosen few who get to express and celebrate their obsessive love for the yeast-based spread on a variety of social media platforms.

The Marmarati are the product of (or, you might say, they simply are) a social media campaign by We are social. It’s a neat bit of brand-as-movement campaign-building, a sort of next step from initiatives like the Cadbury’s For The Love Of Wispa campaign. And, as befits any decent secret society, especially in the post-Dan Brown era, they have a Latin motto.

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