One of the primary functions of a third-party social media platform, like Sprout Social or Agorapulse, is to moderate the comments people post on your brand’s content. You can hide comments, delete them, even ban the person if they’re being a troll.
Sometimes, brand managers hide comments or product reviews that use profanity, because they think seeing those might negatively impact consumers’ feelings about them.
Sometimes, the platforms do that for us — Amazon and TripAdvisor prohibit the use of swear words.
But have we got that wrong? Could leaving profanity in actually help our brand?
That’s what Katherine Lafreniere set out to discover. She is an Assistant Professor at the Dhillon School of Business at the University of Lethbridge. She and her colleagues last month published an academic research paper called “The Power of Profanity: The Meaning and Impact of Swear Words in Word of Mouth”.
She spoke with our podcast host Tod Maffin earlier. Here is a brief segment from that interview. You can hear the full interview on our Premium Podcast.
Dr. Lafreniere: We found that the presence of swear words in a review would increase the number of “helpful” votes that the review received. This was studied on both Amazon and Yelp reviews.
And we saw through experimental studies that it also increased perceptions of the product, where people liked the product under review a little bit more when there was a swear word present.
Tod: So the helpful thing you're mentioning is those platforms have a button that lets people indicate whether or not they perceive that review to be “helpful.” So that was your primary measure?
Dr. Lafreniere: Yes, for the field data it was.
Tod: Was there a difference between people using swear words, positively or negatively? I'm thinking like “This was a fucking amazing meal” would be positive, but “This dishwasher is fucking loud” would be negative. Was there a difference in the usage positive or negative use?
Dr. Lafreniere: Under both positive and negative reviews, the review was considered to be more helpful. But of course, for an extremely negative review with the use of the swear word, then people would like the product a little bit less. But under both situations, whether it was negative or positive, they found it to be more useful and helpful.
Tod: Did that surprise you going into what perhaps you might have expected?
Dr. Lafreniere: It definitely did! We're taught about swear words being bad. And yet we're seeing them all around us — not just in our daily conversations, in our daily lives, but especially online. Up to 8% of Twitter posts and Yelp reviews are containing at least one swear word.
Tod: I think in your study, you'd mentioned that the Yelp reviews in particular, were really high usage — I think it was actually over 8% use profanity. Why do you think people turn to strong language more online than in person?
Dr. Lafreniere: That's a good question. It could be because on the internet, people are more open to sharing their their feelings and their their intuition, which, of course, when people feel strong emotions, that's when people tend to swear more often.
And so that could be it. But also, if you look at the guidelines on Yelp, compared to other platforms, they do tolerate swear words, whereas other platforms, might not so they're probably getting a more realistic [view] of how often swear words are used to post to Amazon which would be limiting swear word use every once in a while.
