Happy Tuesday, Boolean Wizards! I’m here to take you BTS (that’s behind the scenes - not the Korean supergroup) of the boolean behind the recent Meltwater blog: Millennial Cringe: What it is, who’s talking about it, and what it tells marketers.
If you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen Gen-Zers mocking things like the millennial pause (the moment 30-somethings and older take before speaking in a recorded video), or the self-deprecating and (dated) pop culture-conscious nature of millennial humor.
For the blog, our team used Meltwater tools to take a closer look at the millennial cringe conversation. Want to learn just how they did it? Keep reading for:
How to do social listening around Millennial Cringe:
To start, our team created a boolean search around millennial cringe itself to get an idea of what the larger conversation looked like. To get the results in the blog, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create an Advanced Search in Explore
Step 2: Copy and paste this Boolean string into Explore:
((milennial* OR millenial* OR millennial*) NEAR/30 (cring* OR cheugy)) NOT (RT OR QT OR "Survivor: Millennials vs. Gen X Reunion" OR "Black Mirror" OR "15 Best Movies to Watch" OR "A Purposeful Life by Dawn Butler" OR "cringe-inducing millennial slang" OR "4chan")
Step 3: Adjust the date range
Of course, you can search for any dates you’re interested in, but to replicate our team’s search you’ll need to adjust the date range to 11/01/2022 through 11/01/2023.
Step 4: Apply Filters:
- To clean up the data, next to “Filter set” click “Source type” and select all types except for Product Reviews, Request for Proposal, and RSS, then click Search.
- Our team also used the “Language” filter, and selected only English.
Where to find the data visualizations shown in the blog:
- The first graph under “How much are people talking about millennial cringe?” is of course right at the top of the Overview page. The spikes are where the interior design article and Plenty of Fish survey in the blog came from. 📈
- Scroll down just below that graph to find AI-Powered Clusters, where the Plenty of Fish survey is shown to be one of the biggest stories about millennial cringe of the year.
- The demographic visualizations for gender and age breakdown can be found on the Author tab.
By looking at the top posts and stories about millennial cringe surfaced by this search, our team decided to dig further into the millennial pause and millennial humor. Read on for:
How to take a closer look at the millennial pause and millennial humor:
To get a look at some of the year’s top stories on these two sub-topics, you can follow the same steps as above when creating your search, but with these updated boolean strings. To recap:
Step 1: Create an Advanced Search in Explore
Step 2: Copy and paste the Boolean string you’d like to search into Explore:
For the millennial pause:
("milennial* pause" OR "millenial* pause" OR "millennial* pause") NOT (RT OR QT)
For millennial humor:
("milennial* humor" OR "millenial* humor" OR "millennial* humor" OR "milennial* humour" OR "millenial* humour" OR "millennial* humour") NOT (RT OR QT OR "Karan Soni" OR Putin OR "Kyle Gaddo")
Step 3: Adjust the date range
Again, to replicate our team’s search you’ll need to adjust the date range to 11/01/2022 through 11/01/2023.
Step 4: Apply Filters:
The same filters apply to these searches. (that’s all Source types except for Product Reviews, Request for Proposal, and RSS; and under Language, select English)
Sound off in the comments 💬
- What other trends surface in the initial “millennial cringe” search you think are worth digging deeper into? Bonus points: how would you construct the boolean? 🧙
- Did any of the demographics talking about this topic surprise you? 😳
- Are you going to stop using the 😭 emoji now? (Personally, I am going to use it EVEN HARDER) 💅
