In mid-November, organic carrots at several major stores across the United States were linked to an E. coli outbreak. Also, that week, Delta Airlines said it would start serving Shake Shack cheeseburgers on certain flights from Boston. Consumers reacted to both topics, with concerns and questions over the carrot recall and criticism on social media over Delta’s decision to serve reheated cheeseburgers.

While both the carrot recall and Delta Airlines received a significant number of mentions, both finished far behind the number of Taylor Swift mentions over that same time period. 

This may seem like an irrelevant comparison, and if we were benchmarking competitors or calculating share of voice from a marketing perspective, it probably would be. However, comparison search in Meltwater can also be a valuable tool when it comes to understanding the true scope of a PR moment or crisis. Today, I’m going to show you why I keep a Taylor Swift search in my library of Explore searches, and how it helps me understand, communicate and react to viral moments for seemingly unrelated brands. 

Music’s biggest star and TIME magazine’s Person of the Year is a constant fixture at the top or near the top of trending lists across social and traditional media. This consistency makes it the ideal comparison to your crisis du jour. Having a pre-built Taylor Swift search can allow for a quick comparison to other searches built to monitor your current situation, allowing you to keep a grounded, data-driven perspective on the scope. Using the Comparison tab on the Explore home page, create a new comparison between the current crisis searches and the pre-built Taylor Swift search. 

Getting back to our earlier comparison, both the Delta Airlines and carrot recall events received a notable amount of media coverage during the week of November 18-22, 2024. Let’s take a look at how Meltwater helped spot key moments in time when compared to the Taylor Swift search.

To put this to work for your brand, here’s how to get started: 

1. Build your searches to monitor the subject or developing topic/crisis in Explore: Writing a search is its own topic, so I’ll leave this part to you, but I recommend using the AI Search Assistant to make this part as painless as possible. The Meltwater Help Center also has some examples of common boolean strings for crisis management to help you get started.
2. Have a pre-built Taylor Swift search ready in Explore for use as a comparison: Again, the AI Search Assistant will be your best friend! Don’t overthink this. You don’t need to fine-tune it to get results.
3. From the Explore Home Page, click on the Comparison tab
4. Click on the + sign to create a new comparison
5. Click on “add search” then add up to 10 searches to compare. Find the search (or searches) on your topic and also add in the Taylor Swift search.
6. Click update results to run your comparison

If you need more detailed help creating a comparison search, the Meltwater Help Center walks through it step by step here). 

Once I set up the comparison for Taylor Swift and my two key food events, I immediately saw that while both the carrot recall and Delta Airlines received a significant number of mentions, both finished far behind the number of Taylor Swift mentions over that same period. 

The comparison dashboard also reveals other metrics that can be useful in pinpointing the key moments in time. For example, on Nov. 19, impressions on X for Delta Airlines came very close to the Taylor Swift trendline. This change can also be seen on the hourly mentions chart for Nov. 19 and would have been key for anyone monitoring this comparison on that day. It contextualizes this moment as a huge one: it’s the only time the conversations around either of these two events came close to Taylor numbers, and it indicates a critical cultural moment.

As interest and reaction to both the carrot recall and the Delta/Shake Shack partnership faded at the end of the week, mentions of Taylor Swift surged due to her concerts that weekend in Canada. Not for nothing, that same week, Meltwater showed how Explore could be used to track and respond to last-minute Ticketmaster drops to secure Taylor Swift tickets. Truly, there is no limit to the creative ways Taylor Swift can be used to leverage Meltwater insights.

Comparison Tips

💡 Tip: To help you get the most out of your comparison when researching, focus on:

• Time Frame: Adjust the date range to make sure you are focused on the right time frame, especially if the issue is only a few hours or days old, instead of defaulting to the last 7 days. 
• Location: Check your searches to make sure you are getting the locations that matter most to you. When I first ran this example, I had a global search set for Taylor Swift mentions at a time she was performing in Canada. The number of U.S. mentions was a much smaller percentage and switching to U.S. mentions gave a better comparison to the other topics.
• Trends: The comparison dashboard will have mentions by search, share of voice, X Impression trends and other insights. Analyze each trend line that rises above the Taylor Swift line. Click on the peak of these spikes to gain valuable insight into media mentions or social comments to gather intelligence, keywords and other details to help you form your communications strategy and inform leadership and stakeholders. 
• Customize: By clicking on the drop down for each search at the top of the page, you can copy that search, override the date or change how the search shows up in the charts and displays.