Bold Brands
Top 5

Angela Palladino

Senior Director, Insights & Analytics

Walmart

Winner 2024

Angela Palladino

What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?

My job title is Senior Director, Insights & Analytics. I leverage social listening tools to help our company closely monitor today's rapidly evolving social, political and cultural domains. This allows us to identify trends, sentiment, and events that may impact Walmart’s business direction or reputation. Additionally, these insights help us to better understand what is most important to our stakeholders, and how we can better serve them. 

What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?

My educational background is in business and marketing sparked an early fascination with understanding consumer motivations and behavior. This led me to an opportunity early out of college to become a founding employee at a New York City social listening startup, forging the industry while it was still in its infancy. Over my career across both agencies and early-stage ventures, I've always sought out roles centering around data analytics to optimize decision making. Social data just happens to be one of the most fascinating data sets I get to work with. 

What has been your biggest achievement?

I'm proud to have pioneered Walmart's insights and analytics capability within our Corporate Affairs team from the ground up. When I joined, the social listening capacity was non-existent despite being vital for tracking brand reputation. Now, we have a world-class function with some of the best emerging technology partners on the market. 

What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?

Earlier in my analytics career, I made the mistake of over-indexing on reactive reporting of social media metrics versus truly informing business strategy. When I led my first insights team, in my excitement to demonstrate tangible value, my dashboards fixated on vanity metrics around tweet impressions, hashtag volumes, influencer mentions and other engagement data points.

However, as I matured, I realized chasing vanity metrics can become a mindless numbers game without actually moving the needle on outcomes. I had focused more on what I could measure versus aligning analytics to what truly drives strategic decisions day-to-day.

Putting strategy first taught me the boldest mistakes sometimes start subtly. I'm grateful for leaders who challenged me to step back and ensure the work always ladders up to enabling strategic business outcomes.

What would be your dream project to work on?

My dream project would leverage social data analysis to uncover actionable insights that drive positive societal change. Specifically, I would love to lead a proactive initiative and team - where we identify unmet community needs and take action in a meaningful, real-world way. 

Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?

 I believe there are ethical ways and unethical ways to utilize social media data. The ‘right’ approach involves transparently collecting and handling user data, and allowing for anonymized aggregation. Integrity is fundamental, collectors and users of the data have an obligation to be honest and ethical in how they are using it. 

Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?

Yes, there is a lot of untapped potential for teams to be leveraging social data, and a chance to connect insights across functions horizontally. More often than not, traditional market research is siloed from social media listening capabilities. But if analysts collaborate cross-functionally to piece together an integrated 360 view of customer feedback and market signals, I believe significant white space would emerge to enhance experiences and relationships at key moments. 

What’s your favourite data source to use and why?

My favorite data source to utilize in my insights work is Reddit. I appreciate the depth, transparency, and authenticity inherent in many Reddit discussions. The diversity and scale of the various interest groups help drive the discovery of fringe trends and concerns before they’ve reached TikTok or X. I can surface insights and leading indicators on Reddit weeks ahead of the mainstream curve, which benefits strategic planning early on.

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