Posted March 10, 2025

Some takeaways from this reporting summarize the impacts of social media narratives around egg scarcities to egg and retail brands such as Eggland's Best, Happy Egg, Land O'Lakes, Costco, Safeway, Trader Joe's and others. Highlights include:

• Upside down pricing among store and premium brands;

• Allegations of price gouging by grocery retailers

• Operations management concerns as shoppers compete for limited supplies

• Plus more ... 

Posted February 17, 2025

An emerging narrative intended to bring awareness to the meaning and importance of an independent judiciary branch in the U.S.'s constitutionally based governance structure was co-opted by a far right wing leader who posted that the judicial branch is corrupted and a "scam."  An earlier version of this analysis was posted at LinkedIn.

Published January 22, 2025

Who is thinking about next Christmas? Some of you are! Market planners easily think a year in advance using online discussion and other research to answer their specific questions to use as they prep for Christmas sales a year or more away. Among the best times to do that using social media is during the period just after Thanksgiving when people are actively talking to each other. 

 For this brief, rather than ask a specific question a marketer might ask like “What themes, trends, and preferences emerge around the [insert product here] gifter?”, We asked … “When people talk about their ‘favorite Christmas traditions,’ what emerged?”

Published December 6, 2024

Journalists activity on Bluesky Social has increased by over 400% since the U.S. 2024 Election Day although the initial surge in the first two weeks following has slowed. This brief read overviews accounts and their content, and the lack of presence of big brands among other things. 

Published August 8, 2024

The Washington Post offered a good review of food savings app Flashfood. The app invites grocers to market food that is nearing the end of its shelf life at deeply discounted prices to thrifty shoppers so it is not discarded as a total loss. 

We looked at what effect, if any, the article had on Flashfood's social media conversation, and then took a broader look at the Flashfood app discussion using some of the advanced and newest analytic tools, such as Trends and Copilot AI, on offer by our friends at YouScan.  

Published July 28, 2024

 Southwest Airlines, on July 25th, said they will do away with their open seating. The line-up at the gate, based on your check-in time time, will be ditched. Like other airlines you will select a seat when you make your reservation. This announcement signaled a big shift in their core brand identity going as far back as Southwest's founding. We asked, "What was the early reaction to Southwest Airlines' policy changes that also included the sales of 'premium' seating and new overnight operations?" 

This snapshot summary finds reasons for Southwest to be assured and reasons for concerns. Recommendations for brand, comms, and PR teams to consider are offered. 

Published July 22, 2024 

I looked at two American stories as they were portrayed through the lens of Russian media propaganda, the Crowdstrike Falcon Monitor product update that induced an outage among their customers, and the departure of President Biden from the U.S. Presidential election. These were completely different stories, still they share similarities worth examining in how state propagandists present facts and experts together with facets of information distribution that were common to both stories. It also includes a list of online news sites that may not be what they appear at first to be, local news outlets. 

 Published April 23, 2024 

The article warns that, heading into the 2024 elections, there may be increasing attempts across social media to cast doubt on the validity of votes by the elderly.

Published March 17, 2024 

This data summary compares the count of social and news media posts of Cabbage Recipes and Kale Recipes from 2022 through Mid March 2024 overall and compares them by shared mention categories.

We wished to test a hypothesis: Cabbage recipe mentions have increased compared to kale recipe mentions over the past two years. 

The hypothesis was formed based on inflating food prices and cabbage’s relatively low unit cost in the supermarket grocery aisle. We compared it to kale because both are plentiful in groceries in the U.S. and were curious to see any effect on kale’s earlier surge in popularity. 

Shared categories for each were created such as Taste, Nutrition, Convenience, and Budget Friendliness. Interesting trends were unearthed that suggest further areas for research exploration that could be useful for anyone involved in food production, marketing, distribution, preparation, nutritional counseling and more. Click the preview image to read and download, free.

Published February 27, 2024

This report explores the social insights that can be gleaned about the professional forestry community through their online discourse. The research reveals a fascinating business, government, academic and socio/cultural ecosystem of experts. It offers analysis on the nature of forestry as an agricultural industry, a land management activity, and as a generative activity as part of the solution to our current climate and biodiversity problems. You might be surprised how broad the community is. 

Among the takeaways you'll find in this report: If you’re interested in growing an online following that reacts to your work, stay true in your posting activity to your account’s social media biography. Those who posted around their areas of expertise had higher engagement compared to those whose post topics didn’t match their biographies. The opposite inference is important: Be sure your biography matches your post contents. If you post on forestry and your biography doesn’t mention the word forests or forestry, you may be losing visibility opportunities.  Download free the full report and contact us for more information.

Published August 21, 2023

We took a look at what happened and what might it mean when the pop trend #Barbie trend interseected with the online public now armed with easy to use generative A.I. tools like Dall-E 2, Midjourney CapCut, or Stable Diffusion.

We start the report with some summary insights and its potential implications to individuals, to businesses, and to the broader general culture. Then you will find the underlying analysis containing many whimsical images but also some disturbing imagery, too. The analysis suggests the difficulties we will continue to face with the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence 

Published July 5, 2023

Tragic fires attributed to, sometimes incorrectly, e-bike and e-scooter batteries and charging practices, has resulted in a surge in social and other media discussion. 

Our first insight is that micro-mobility sits squarely at the intersection of consumer  product safety, decarbonization, public transport, workers rights, and regulatory debates. As a transport option, it risks becoming another point of polarization in the media culture wars. 

This introductory overview more insights and implications on discussion trends, their content sources, geography of the U.S. discussion, insights around micro-mobility detractors and advocates, the perception of e-commerce retailers such as Amazon and Alibaba, and positive and negative anecdotes directed towards specific e-bike brands. 

Reddit's decision to update their API access caused a revolt among their volunteer subreddit moderator (mods) community. At one point well over 8,000 their subreddits (individual forums at Reddit) were private or restricted for viewing or posting. At issue was the API fees to be imposed on third-party developers, many of whom have improved the Reddit experience for some of those who love the platform, including the mods who prefer these apps for maintaining community order. 

This post offers data, insights and thoughts for consideration. A version was originally published on June 15th, 2023 at LinkedIn and has been updated with some of the news since then. 

AI holds promise in helping solve problems in health, transportation, sustainability and much, much more. But perils abound as well. These include privacy & surveillance, work & automation, and intellectual property rights. Among the most concerning is the reality and perceptions of bias in the training input and the output. Biased results fuel mistrust in the technology. Much more importantly, bias and perceptions of bias promote mistrust in the people and institutions behind the development and deployment of AI systems. 

We created this bias measurement to introduce a wider understanding of the cultural landscape and invite you to more deeply explore the specifics to aid in decisions to  build (or not build) or deploy (or not) AI solutions that are trustworthy and empower people.

Our review of the Social Media posts around Silicon Valley Bank’s failure revealed warnings of its insolvency by independent analysts that stretched back into the summer of 2022. Our analysis found that meaningful signals were missed or ignored, suggests the risk mismatch of crypto exposure with mainstream banking activities, and highlights the importance of integrity and transparency in bank and regulator communications. 

Published March17th, 2023 

The snow, rain and flooding continued due to the Atmospheric Rivers impacting California. Our report overviewed what drove the social media conversation with specific insights on the most engaging content across TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and more, who created it, the quality of the information presented and what can be learned from it. 

Published February 8th, 2023

This post is inspired by the article in the New York Times that is based on research by social intelligence experts Graphika.  We build upon both with a human analysis of the facial features in the video that is useful in detecting deep fake images, whether in still or video formats. A follow-up slide points to useful resources working in the same or associated spaces. 

Published 15 October, 2022 

The important September story is the low confidence mentions around the impartiality of the Supreme Court. Two narratives predominated: 

• First was the discourse about the politicization of the Supreme Court’s decisions and internal divisions among the Justices. 

• Second, was the conflict of interest concerns surrounding Justice Thomas’ decisions and his spouse, Virginia “Ginny” Thomas, and her work for those who sought to change the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.  

Confidence in The President fell on the abuse of power narrative about “the Biden DOJ” and the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. At the same time, the political left’s discourse about a corrupt “bought a paid for” federal judicial branch, singling out Judge AileenCannon, added to the continued low sentiment score in the The Justice System category.  

The popularity of Former President Barack Obama enabled a surge in positive “faith in democracy” during early September remarks that praised President Biden’s leadership but did not translate into  an increase of confidence, faith, or trust in The President as a leader. 

Published 8 September, 2022 

Research Tree’s second monthly edition of our Trust Index in U.S. Institutions ticked up in most measures with marked improvements in the Democracy/Elections/Government and Congress categories. The FBI’s raid in search of federal documents at the Mar-a-Lago resort home of the former president and the ramping up of congressional campaigns heading into the November elections were important to the lift in each. Continuing confusion around public health guidance related to COVID-19 led to a decrease in the already low score in The U.S. Healthcare category.  The category score for The President improved 0.9 points on legislative victories and international polling.  Click on the doc for much more detail. 

Published 25 August, 2022

The Inflation Reduction Act contains powerful incentives to address climate change and many of the interrelated issues that surround it. An Electric Vehicle tax credit of up to $7,500 is among the most important incentives. We reviewed the social media discussion around the tax credit to learn how it was received, who drove the volume and sentiment towards it, and how it affected the perception towards the most mentioned auto brands.

Overall, the index indicates that the trust discussion is generally quite negative. The highest discussion volume was around the trust  and mistrust that is held in democratic institutions including confidence in elections and the rule of law. Even the most highly regarded institutions this month, such as Small Businesses and Labor Unions, often appeared in the context of other institutions that were held in lower esteem thus lowering the overall sentiment. 

A quantitative one pager noting the impact of the beloved artist's appearance at the legendary Newport Folk Festival.  Joni Mitchell's appearance was met with joy, surprise and more bittersweet emotions from fans who appreciated the privilege of being in the same space and time with her.

Price inflation has been causing widespread public anxiety for the present and future manifesting just as the worst of the pandemic appeared to be behind us and real wages were increasing for the first time in decades. The research sought to understand how thematic trends about inflation in the U.S. have changed since the online discussion started its upward trajectory in the spring of 2021.  

We found that inflation has entered the culture wars in unfortunately predictable ways.  The research should offer strategists and policy experts a new perspective to the online debate that we hope will be leveraged to improve the national conversation around economic opportunity and policy.  

Social and digital media content awareness should extend to the many forms of risk that are particular to your organization or business. At the top of risk list are harms to people, property, operational, and reputation risk. This brief will help you get started constructing and maintaining an online defensive monitoring program and situating it within a broader risk awareness and crisis management process.