“(F)ood and beverage companies have been a particularly hot target” for activists on social media, says Politico in a review of activities since the uproar over lean finely textured beef AKA pink slime. “Three of the top seven most popular petitions of all time on Change.org are about animal welfare in meat production, and more than two dozen food-related petitions have each earned tens of thousands of signatures, many of them hundreds of thousands.”
The story, by Helena Bottemiller Evich, says food companies “and their PR consultants use sophisticated social media monitoring, or ‘listening’ tools, including things like word clouds, maps and graphs designed to give companies a better idea of who is talking about their brands and what they are saying.”