The Monarchy & The British: Listening In

The story we tell in this paper provides a snapshot of how the British public experienced two very unusual weekends: The 2011 Royal Wedding and 2012 Diamond Jubilee. Context and benchmarking is key to analysing social media data, whether it is for events, organisations, politicians, products, brands or campaigns. The Royal Wedding and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee provided Ipsos with a unique opportunity to delve down, have some fun and tell a story. So, which event was more popular, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee or Will and Kate’s wedding? As with most of life’s important questions, there is no simple answer. Supporters of the Queen might argue that more than a million Jubilee messages were tweeted over the weekend, 375,078 tweets more than last year’s Royal Wedding. Tweets peaked during the final hour of the Jubilee concert (with 71,000 tweets between 10 and 11pm on Monday 4th June 2012), with another spike during the River Pageant. However, Defenders of The Newly-Weds will rightfully argue that, while the Diamond Jubilee celebrations may have generated more tweets over the course of four days of celebrations, there were more tweets on a single day for The Royal Wedding (593,663 mentions on Twitter on the day of The Wedding). All of this may or may not provide fodder for pubs and dinner tables across the nation. However, there are some valuable insights to be taken from this. Strategic Social Listening Research is retrospective and is valuable. But what’s clear is that we have to have contextual insight if we are really to make sense of what’s going on. If we just had volumes of activity on Twitter for the Jubilee on its own it would have been interesting, but viewed in a vacuum and comparable to what? By linking this type of information with what we’ve seen previously, we can be more holistic in our approach – opening up a wider and clearer picture of the subject we are investigating. Similarly, setting what’s happening on social media against the longer term picture we get from traditional survey research can be powerful, as the next section, covering public opinion and the Royal Family, shows. It also helps us understand the broader impact on public opinion – including the long-term values that people hold – the deep-seated views that people have which are not subject to short-term moods or fluctuations. Opinions on the Monarchy are generally entrenched and more akin to a “value” – formed early in life and not likely to change, only to harden as we grow older. It seems reasonable to conclude that The Royal Wedding further helped to cement the British public’s sense that the country is better off as a monarchy. Our Spring 2012 reading found just 13% wanting to see a republic, the lowest level yet recorded, and a further decrease on the 18% we recorded just before the Royal Wedding weekend - although this has crept back up to 15% during our most recent wave of research carried out in June 2012. Where the public have held a less settled view in recent years has been on the question of whether Charles should become the next king, as opposed to “skipping a generation” in favour of William. This is not a question we ask every month, so it’s difficult to attribute to what extent the changes we have seen over the last 15 months are due to the Royal Wedding and Jubilee weekends. What is clear, however, is that there has been a definite movement in favour of Britain following the “traditional” route, with the Prince of Wales becoming king when the time comes, with a six percentage point increase from 47% just before The Royal Wedding to 53% in our June 2012 survey. Finally, we turn to the realm of traditional opinion polls, and to the type of “approval rating” questions which can and do see fluctuations from month to month. What’s clear from our Summer 2012 research is that the Royal Family enjoy satisfaction scores which our politicians can only dream of. Even during the difficult years of the 1990’s, the public did not sway markedly from the “core value” that Britain should remain a monarchy. But the big events of 2011 - 2012 appear to have cemented a trend we have seen developing steadily since the turn of the century: a Royal Family which has listened and moved on. In doing so, it has built up a stock of good will that will be able to withstand “what happened in Vegas”.