Facebook’s Gross National Happiness index uses NLP and sentiment analyses to measure how happy people on Facebook are on a day-to-day basis by looking at the number of positive and negative words they’re using when updating their status.
Using NLP subject extraction, Facebook’s data team can take this one step further by producing a Gross National Meme index.
These tools can quickly become a guerrilla marketer’s dream product. Advertisements don’t always have to suck (as evident by the highly viewed ads that come out for each year’s Superbowl). I’m sure marketers who would love to use this data to rapidly produce guerrilla marketing ads (trendy ad’s that you would find entertaining, and thus less likely to filter out) in response to today’s memes.
Combined with rapid response supply chaining, businesses can even tailor goods to today’s trendy hot topics. A great example of this is covered in Thomas Friedman’s book – The World is Flat:
“Zara is also prepared to adapt when unforeseen events occur. Immediately after September 11, Zara executives realized that consumers were in a somber mood, and within just a few weeks [Zara executives]
had stocked their stores with new merchandise that was predominantly black.” This strategy is known in the business as “postponement,” and the idea, explained Sheffi, whose latest work is The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage, is that as it becomes harder and harder to forecast demand, good companies find ways to postpone adding value to their products until the last possible moment.“
Satirical TV shows, like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park and the League, leverage and satirize current events extremely well to product high quality content (example: Gangam Style and the Avengers in last week’s South Park Halloween episode).
