After the first day of ANCYL president Julius Malema's disciplinary hearing at Luthuli House this week, South Africans had generated just short of R2 million worth of negative online publicity for their own country.
This is according to calculations by online reputation management service, BrandsEye.
The company says that events surrounding the ANCYL hearing received 6 826 mentions in 24 hours, and generated 8 419 565 “opportunities to see”.
“This implies that 87% of the South African population with Internet access was exposed to this conversation in some form,” says BrandsEye. “This equates to advert value equivalent of R1 945 867. Unfortunately, most of this didn't show South Africa in a positive light.
“That's a considerable amount of particularly negative coverage that we ourselves generated about our own country.”
The first day of Malema's hearing descended into chaos as his supporters turned violent in the city centre. South Africans took to the social networks to express their outrage at the behaviour of the youth league members or “young lions”.
Malema and other youth league officials are facing charges of bringing the ruling party into disrepute and sowing divisions in the ANC. The charges followed Malema's statements that the ANCYL would send a delegation to Botswana to consolidate the opposition parties and help bring about a regime change.
Social sentiment
The social networks were the most active in the conversation surrounding the hearing, accounting for 88% of the total conversation, while press sites drove 1.5% and journalists reporting live from Luthuli House accounting for 4.5% of the total conversation.
In order to gauge the general sentiment of the conversation, BrandsEye says each mention was assigned a score on a 10-point scale based on the strength of the author's feelings towards the subject. Of the 5 949 mentions of Malema, 30% displayed negative sentiment while 9% endorsed the ANCYL and 61% spoke neutrally. Other trending topics were Jacob Zuma, Gwede Mantashe, Floyd Shivambu and the school children involved in the riot.
“To put this in context, this year's budget speech only received 812 mentions, while the state of the nation address only received 3 352 mentions (the drinking game excluded),” notes BrandsEye. It adds that had the drinking game been included, it still only received 6 180 mentions.
From this, BrandsEye says it can be concluded that involvement in the conversation around the ANCYL hearing was not motivated in anyway by entertainment value, which is often biased within social media.
According to the company, large mobile brands can only expect to receive about 250 mentions per day in SA.
“We still need to be mindful of what we put out into the world. SA can't afford to have nearly R2 million worth of particularly negative coverage, least of all self-generated.”
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