Viral rape story dissipates

"This story elicited an expected overwhelmingly negative market response, as both local and international contributors expressed disgust towards the situation. The international commentary in particular drew specific sentiment correlations between the video and their perceptions of the state and safety of South Africa as a country," says Tim Shier, MD of BrandsEye, a crowdsourced online reputation management service.

History

At 7am on Wednesday, 19 April 2012, the internet came alive as the story began to circulate via social media. By 11am, traditional media had begun to push the story and this resulted in dramatic growth in overall social media interest.

While South Africa owned 75% of the conversation, it is important to recognise that a large portion of the conversation came from outside of South Africa, with the US and UK featuring highly as drivers of the conversation.

The first comment on social media was at 4.53am by @DaBruva5yf and by 9.29am, it was trending across South Africa. This resulted in sustained volumes throughout the day.

In total, there were 9 768 individual mentions of this situation, with 87% coming from Twitter. Interestingly, the volume of conversation declined dramatically after 1pm, which is very uncharacteristic of a situation with such a high level of public interest.

Press played key role

Consumers drove 97% of the total volume of conversation. That said, the press played a key role in exposing the situation with the story being published on the likes of CNN, providing reliable information and setting the social agenda across the consumer space.

The top contributor to the conversation was @ndabanator with 40 mentions and, in the majority of cases, the emotional nature of the story caused people to push their individual communities actively to engage in the situation.

A large portion of the conversation was related to individuals sharing information through re-tweets with strong emotive responses with words such as "shocking" predominant throughout the data. It's also interesting to see the high level of engagement with the presidency as the community sought answers and looked to the government for comment.

Feedback

"Consumers are typically massively fickle - chasing the newest and most interesting story. Monday's drop will decline, until such time as the press publishes more info relating to the case," said Shier.

He added that the market is far more fickle than previously thought and, without a unifying body (i.e. RapeLine or the like) converting the interest into activism, consumers had no outlet. The result is that the conversation and focus disparate.