Speak Beautiful
Dove and Twitter Launch #SpeakBeautiful Effect, a new technology that analyzes Tweets about appearance to help us realize the emotional effect of our online words
The situation:
For the past 10 years, Dove has been committed to making beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety–but over the course of those years, the beauty landscape has changed drastically. Now, ideas and opinions about beauty are shared every second through social media feeds—we are, effectively, crowdsourcing a new definition of beauty—but women don't fully realize the power of their posts.
In 2014 alone, women posted 5 million negative Tweets about beauty and body image. Women are two times as likely to say something negative about themselves on Twitter as they are to say something positive about themselves on Twitter. In a world connected by social media, women casually compose Tweets that can be hurtful, damaging, or critical -- to themselves, to others, and to society. These negative conversations--coming from friends, family, celebrities, and advertisers--fill feeds and minds with self-doubt, hindering women on their journeys to beauty confidence.
The idea:
In 2015, Dove and Twitter set out on a mission to transform that reality, inspire behavioral change, and ignite a cultural shift in the beauty conversation on social media by encouraging women everywhere to #SpeakBeautiful.
The execution:
Dove commissioned new research with social media scholar and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Danah Boyd, to better understand how girls are engaging with and affected by social media. 95% of girls have seen negative beauty posts, comments, snaps, videos, or photos, and 72% see these beauty critiques at least once a week.
The #SpeakBeautiful Effect is powered by an algorithm that offers an easy, digestible way to analyze personal behaviors and identify areas where women and can be more positive when sharing messages online. Women can see their own #SpeakBeautiful Effect by Retweeting an invitation from @Dove. Within moments, a user receives a Tweet with a link to her personal experience. Here is a step-by-step look at how the #SpeakBeautiful Effect works:
Step 1: Retweet an invitation from @Dove.
Step 2: The technology sifts through 6 months of history per user.
Step 3: Applies custom linguistic classifiers, built specifically for #SpeakBeautiful, to your real tweets.
Step 4: The classifiers look for a broad selection of body and beauty-related terms and emotions within your tweets to analyze how your words are used in relations to the subject of your post or sentence.
Step 5: Reports a variety of details about your tweets based on the word analysis performed (i.e. types of words you’re using, the frequency of which you are using them, the time of day etc…)
"Hundreds of millions of Tweets are sent every day, and we partnered with Dove to develop a tool that would raise awareness of how our online words can sometimes bombard others with negativity that impacts our confidence and self-esteem" said Patricia Cartes, Head of Global Trust & Safety Outreach at Twitter. "At Twitter, we are proud to be working with Dove to empower the next generation to play a real role in making their personal feed, and larger online world, a kinder, more positive place."
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