RealAg LIVE! with Christina Crowley-Arklie on the mainstream perception of agriculture

How did one tweet change an entire conversation surrounding butter in this country? What role did social media play in this thing called #buttergate? What can we, as an industry, learn from one consumer-facing issue that literally went around the world?

Guest host Lyndsey Smith is joined by digital media strategist Christina Crowley-Arklie for today’s RealAg LIVE!

RealAg LIVE! streams every weekday at 3 pm E on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter!

SUMMARY

• Public perception
• Why is my butter hardening? We lost sight of the original question.
• #Buttergate
• This conversation is NOT done yet.
• Is this the future of how food policy in Canada is going to be shaped?
• Was this a setup? Or was there really meat here?
• There have been a lot of assumptions going around. The positives? It did bring up some conversation about food.
• How do you balance opinion versus research and communicate this to audiences?
• Social media started this whole conversation — and from there, the narrative just took off. Especially when it comes to palm oil, palmitic acid, and palm by-products
• Broken social contract? That’s a fabrication, says host Lyndsey
• How do we as communicators know when these online narratives are something worth jumping on? This is why PR companies and crisis management people gets paid the big bucks!
• Transparency — how much do you share? Where do you draw the line in the sand?
• The turnaround time on some of these things isn’t always great
• How do we encourage people to pay attention to the experts, and not just opinions?
• We can’t blame one person for sparking a conversation
• Andrew Campbell was one that jumped on this in a great way — educating, and being transparent. We need more of that in this industry
• How available are we to answer a question when one comes up?
• Let’s remember that not everything in the social space is factual answers. Sometimes, we just have to wait.
• You can have the best policies, but if you can’t communicate them, it doesn’t matter. Communication is everything.
• The divisiveness that started coming out during all of #buttergate was not professional. We need to do better as an industry.
• Harassment is not the way to go when you disagree with someone
• It’s not always the issue at hand, it’s how you respond to the issue at hand
• “A journey to an opinion.”
• Advocates should try to be media trained if they can. That’s a big thing
• Try to put yourselves in the shoes of the consumers
• Good crisis management is trying to answer the questions before they are even asked
• If researchers and academia are able to build the trust with social media, then are they worth being trusted?
• We have a connection with everyone, because everyone eats!
• In a court of public opinion, the public always wins.

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