Jessica Bundy

What’s the one thing you wish you’d known when you started in social listening?

I will say, it would have been nice to know just how fast the pace of change can be in this discipline. It seems like my team and I always have to be on our toes for new platforms, data privacy laws being enacted, consumer social media behavior changes, and more. All of these things impact our day-to-day work, and staying on top of them requires a time investment that doesn’t lead to producing any reports! Over time I realized the importance of continually staying up to date in the space by being a consumer of social media, an active participant in relevant industry groups, and frequently attending webinars, conferences, and seeing new tools demoed. Anyone new to the field should absolutely keep this in mind.

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Have you had any experiences that have made you want to quit? What made you keep going?

None that made me want to quit per se, but there has been temptation for me to change disciplines over the years. As much as I love social intelligence, I will more than likely change disciplines at some point, to become a more well-rounded researcher and make space for someone to come in to my role with a fresh perspective. The biggest challenges over the years have been people who didn’t see the value of social intelligence, as well as the opposite, being pulled in too many directions at once because so many teams want and need reporting from us! What made me keep going is my amazing team, I know it’s cliche, but I really work with some of the best people in the business; they are smart, compassionate, and creative people who make it a joy to show up and do the work we do together. 

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What role does tech play in your social intelligence process? Where to people contribute?

I’ve always found that social intelligence tech/social listening tools have the power to take the most tedious part of the process, data collection and aggregation, and make it completely streamlined for analytics teams like mine to use. The amount of time and money it would take to build something in-house, foster relationships with individual social platforms, and then store all the data just seems completely unrealistic for an organization of any size. My team on the other hand, I think we get to do the best parts, we get to be creative and live in the area where art meets science. Even with the rise of LLMs and artificial intelligence, I think a certain amount of hands-on data analysis will always be valuable, that way the person building the report can really internalize and capture the human experiences they are reading about online. 

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Who have you seen as a mentor in your career?

I have been lucky enough to have multiple mentors, sponsors, and all around wonderful people who have influenced my career for the better. Two who stand out are my first leader, Kadee Kochanski, the person who saw something in me and gave me the job and the tools that kicked off my whole career in social intelligence. Another is Joe Rand, one of our Vice Presidents at Disney, who through his years of experience in multiple marketing disciplines has taught me the incredibly valuable skill of understanding your partners and building strong relationships with them. This is something that every analytics professional should master. I’m even luckier to be able to say that both of these people still lend me an ear and a valued perspective whenever I need it, whether it’s related to social listening or not!

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Most embarrassing mistake you made in a social listening project - what did you learn from it?

Something I’ve definitely done before when under a time crunch and moving too quick, is sharing a metric that didn’t make sense when further analysis was done. I’ve learned the best thing to do is quickly correct it, as opposed to waiting to see if anyone notices or finds out. I would never want business decisions being made based on something I shared that turned out to be incorrect. The loss of trust in myself and my team would be far worse than just admitting to an error. My advice to anyone who has done something similar is to take steps to prevent yourself from making the same mistake, often by adding a new check or balance in your process. It’s also valuable to remember that no matter how urgent a request might be, doing something right the first time is always going to be faster than making a mistake and having to fix it. 

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How do you see the future of social listening evolving?

Like so many disciplines I absolutely see the potential for increased applications of artificial intelligence, but without losing the valuable context a human analyst can provide. A concept my leader, Rich Pepin, shared about AI in research that really stuck with me is the idea of using AI as a jumping off point. Many of us are better at editing than we are at creating a report from scratch. Just like writing papers in college, the hardest part sometimes is getting that first draft down, even if it’s not pretty and changes dozens of times from there! If we can get large language models to take a first stab at summarizing what they see in social media data, it could be a huge timesaver for teams like mine. I also believe social listening is going to continue to evolve at a rapid pace in general, as it needs to keep up with human communication styles and our societal needs for connection as they change. 

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What’s the most useful data source? Are there any you find useless? Why?

I think all sources can be useful and their use in a given report simply varies based on the question you are trying to answer. Instagram and X(Twitter) are large sources of data for most social intelligence teams, and my team has gleaned countless insights from those platforms. However, there have been cases where we needed to report on a single source to get at a very specific group or answer a question that could only be explored using a platform like YouTube or Reddit. There’s not one single source I would classify as useless, becauseI think all data has the potential to be valuable.

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How have you been able to win over ney-sayers throughout your career?

In my experience, the best way to do this is to bridge the gap between social media data and the data sources the ney-sayers are already comfortable with. Very often social listening will have a lot of overlap in insight with sources like traditional surveys, focus groups, online panels, etc. By partnering with the teams doing that research and presenting findings together, you can lend more credibility to both sources. The next step is showcasing where the sources differed in terms of what insights were found, and why. Triangulating the true feelings of the consumer with multiple sources is such an important best practice even when you aren’t trying to win people over!