Ice Cream Social Media

Recently, company NetBase analyzed social media activity (conversations across social networks, review sites, blogs and forums) between April 18 and July 10 and found the top five flavors of ice cream gained the most attention. Those five top flavors of ice cream are chocolate, strawberry, cookie dough, vanilla, and coffee flavors.

Then I used Google Trends to compare people's interest in those five flavors of ice cream and got the graph below.

In the second graph, the interest in those five flavors from highest to lowest are vanilla, chocolate, coffee, strawberry, and chocolate dough. In other words, the two graphs have not small difference. How to interpret those differences (except the accuracy of the first study and the short time for the first study)? 

First, the key words in those two graphs are different. The first study looks at the attention, which could be in good or bad way, while the second one looks at the interest, which is more on the good way. That is because searching terms most of time means that you are interested (in a good way) in the terms. If you hate the chocolate flavor of ice cream, why bother spending time in searching it?

Second, audience engaged in social activities (including social networks, review sites, blogs, and online forums) might be different from people using google. I mean, there are many lurkers who use google search very often but rarely write posts in social media.

What are implications of the comparison? 

It is wrong to simply treat social media as a miniature of internet or real world. Also, it is important to analyze users of social media, which is the basic thing to analyze anything associated with social media.