With consumers more connected than ever and often tending to trust other consumers over brands, how your brand is spoken about and regarded online is paramount to the health and longevity of your business.

How do you spot harmful content relating to your brand and get ahead of adverse consumer conversations? 

Introducing the newest feature in Brandwatch Consumer Research: React Score.  

In this blog, we’ll show you how using React Score can elevate your insights across the organization, from crisis detection and management to competitor benchmarking and brand health. 

Read on or jump directly to each section.  

What is Brandwatch’s React Score?

Brandwatch’s React Score uses advanced machine learning technology to surface real-time insights that could impact your brand reputation. It assigns high, medium, or low-risk labels to online conversations across three categories – harm, spam, and emotionality. This helps organizations understand the levels of risk associated with each online mention and take appropriate action to protect their brand reputation. 

Why React Score matters

Today’s social media landscape is highly fragmented, with consumers sharing opinions and joining discussions across many platforms. React Score can help brands manage this information overload, quickly identifying high-risk content and the why behind it. 

For example, young consumers are known for "buying on belief" and “canceling” brands that don't align with their values on various social issues. A brand getting “canceled” online is a major threat that can cause significant damage to the overall brand image – and sales. 

To shield their reputations, brands need to act swiftly to identify harmful content in conversations and mitigate the potential impact.  

But how does a brand decide when it’s a crisis that needs to be acted on and not just noise? 

React Score can help brands spot early signs of conflict or controversy in online conversations and identify the ones that need immediate attention or response.  

How does React Score work?

Brandwatch’s React Score is a proprietary metric that uses natural language processing to identify online mentions that impact brand reputation in real time.  

As we mentioned, the React Score algorithm automatically buckets any online content into three content types: harm, spam, and emotionality.  

React Score also ranks content by risk level (low, medium, or high) to help brands spot highly charged conversations quickly.

It can also provide brands with the “why” behind spikes in these kinds of conversations using Brandwatch’s AI-powered insights summary feature, which summarizes and groups insights into key themes for better understanding. 

Let’s quickly define the three content buckets used by React Score: 

  • Harm

The harm category within the React Score helps brands identify damaging content that could impact brand reputation.  

Harmful mentions may be characterized as including various forms of harmful language, generalized negative opinions about specific demographics, intent for harm, profanity, or abusive words.  

Examples of harm as it’s defined here are racism, sexism, hate speech, insult, obscenity, toxicity, and threat.  

  • Spam 

The spam category within the React Score helps brands spot irrelevant and promotional messages.  

Spam content is typically identified by having clickbait headlines that prioritize attracting clicks over providing information. Spam often comes in the form of unsolicited messages used for advertising or malicious purposes like phishing.  

Spam mentions are identified by looking for the signals like elements found in clickbait. 

  • Emotionality 

The emotionality category helps brands identify emotionally charged conversations. 

This type of content can exhibit one of eight primary emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise, and anticipation. Online mentions can also be labeled under emotionality if they have a mocking nature, express prejudices, or have a high sentiment score (either positive or negative).  

Factors linked to emotionality include the presence of strong primary emotions, sarcasm, sentiment, and subjectivity (one-sided content).  

How to use React Score

React Score is a chartable metric in Brandwatch Consumer Research that lets you filter your data to assess risks related to your brand. Use it to analyze conversations about products, campaigns, competitors, or industry themes.  

You can use any visualization, from line charts to word clouds, to get a deeper understanding of the threat. And you can set up alerts to get notified of emerging stories that might impact your brand.  

You can also combine React Score with Brandwatch’s AI-driven assistant Iris to identify spikes in harmful content discussions and what’s driving the conversation without you having to trawl through lots of mentions. 

React Score use cases

There are many use cases React Score can help with, but the two main ones are around crisis and competitor benchmarking. 

Crisis detection and management

The best way to monitor potentially damaging stories relating to your brand is by setting up Alerts filtered by React Score and the chosen content category. With this setup in place, stakeholders can receive instant notifications when harmful content appears, and action can be taken quickly.  

Crisis detection is, of course, step one. You’ll then want to monitor the conversation with the help of live dashboards that can categorize incoming mentions by severity in real time and ensure you’re following your crisis management plan.  

With the React Score filter, brands can continuously monitor brand-related discussions, spot emerging threats and opportunities, and take proactive steps to protect their reputation. 

Competitor benchmarking and brand health

Marketers concerned with tracking brand health, especially in relation to competitors, will find the React Score helpful. 

You can compare React Scores across brands to gain insights into competitors' online presence and reputation. This is great for reporting and could even help you identify areas where you can differentiate and gain a strategic advantage. 

Meanwhile, you can also learn from other brands’ mistakes when a misstep causes an online backlash. 

Move faster with online data

With so much data out there, using sentiment analysis alone isn’t always enough. React Score provides brands with advanced analytics and insights, helping them quickly spot damaging content. This new tool will help your brand address potential risks and threats to its brand reputation before they escalate.