In summer blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, the unsuspecting Rachel Chu is invited to Singapore by her boyfriend Nick Young. Little does Rachel know that he’s one of the country’s most eligible bachelors and that a stranger’s snap of the couple is soon to turn into a viral story on social media.

You can watch the scene, accompanied by director Jon M. Chu’s description of how they conceptualized and shot the visuals of a story going around the world here:

But if an explosive story is breaking that concerns a person or a brand, no one’s got time to hire a film crew and a special effects team to measure it and visualize it.

When crisis strikes, a proactive approach is needed. The right kind of data collection infrastructure needs to be in place. Alerts systems need to be set up to notify key stakeholders of the incoming storm. And finally, a visualization system needs to immediately show the key insights so that they can be acted upon.

Here’s how the rumour scene would have looked if Brandwatch had been involved.

1. Collecting the mentions

Let’s start with the obvious.

If you’re a crazy rich person and you want to know what people are saying about you (or if you’re a company and you want to know what people are saying about your CEO or an influencer you’re thinking of working with) you need to have the right set up in place.

To track what people thought of Nick Young and the things he did we’d set up a simple but broad ranging query that would track his name and any associated nicknames across public social media posts. If a tweet from anywhere in the world appeared about Nick Young in a coffee shop, it’d be picked up.

Here’s a simple example where we search for Nick Young mentions while filtering out mentions of the Golden State Warriors basketball player. Here we’re searching for English mentions but the query can go much broader.

2. Alerting key stakeholders

As a person, or business, generating a lot of mentions you don’t necessarily need to be alerted each time you’re mentioned – especially if you’re a high level stakeholder.

You do need to be alerted, however, when a negative story or one that has wider implications begins to circulate.

Brandwatch Business Development Representative Caitlin Wharton commented:

“If Nick Young was clever enough to utilize Brandwatch to track his socialite status across the web, he could have received real-time alerts on an increase of mentions, giving him time to do some crisis management before his overbearing mother released her wrath.”

If Nick had had the right set up he could have reacted to the rumour way before his mom found out the news. Brandwatch Alerts can be set up to send warnings when particular things happen on social – perhaps you’re mentioned by a verified account or next to a particular word that you’re concerned about (like “girlfriend” or “kiss”, for example). Meanwhile, Brandwatch Signals can alert stakeholders when changes happen in the data like an uptick in mentions or negative sentiment. Both could have helped Nick out here.

Meanwhile, if Nick’s mother was so concerned about Nick bringing back a girlfriend she disapproved of, maybe she should have set up her own custom Alerts so she could have found out before the world did.

3. Visualizing the data

Like we said before, when a story is taking off you don’t want to wait for a camera crew to visualize the damage for you. Instead, something much more immediate is needed – something that can track the conversation minute-by-minute and surface important information.

Something like Brandwatch Vizia.

Tito Tafoya, a Brandwatch Data Analyst said:

“If Nick’s mother could have seen all the live conversation about Rachel Chu on a Vizia Deck and been fully informed on the mystery girlfriend Nick was bringing to Singapore, she would have had actionable insights to include in her master plan.”

Summary

Despite us using a popular movie as a thinly veiled plug for our crisis management capabilities, we hope you’ve enjoyed our Brandwatchy take on the rumour spreading scene from Crazy Rich Asians.

If you’ve not seen the movie yet, the reviews look brilliant – I certainly can’t wait to watch when it gets to the UK later this year.

Gemma Joyce

Head of Content, Brandwatch
Gemma Joyce has spent the last decade telling stories with online data, presenting at international events and having her work featured in major media outlets. She now leads Brandwatch’s talented team of content marketers and copywriters, covering social media management, social intelligence, search intelligence, and media intelligence.