What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
Global Digital Insights CoE Lead, Reckitt.
I lead the Digital Insights Centre Of Excellence in Reckitt, globally supporting our 3 business units (Health, Nutrition and Hygiene) in leveraging digital data sources to answer their business questions.
Within that in 2022 I founded and now lead the CDH - Consumer Data Hub, a team of extraordinary internal and external digital insights experts, that combine sources like social, search, ratings and reviews, to support our categories in a variety of use cases: brand equity, purpose and D&I, innovation, comms and activations, demand sensing, product superiority.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I first heard of social listening in 2008, during a Digital Marketing class at IULM University in Milan, where I was completing my master’s degree. The discipline intrigued me, and I ended up starting an internship as a Social Listening Analyst at Blogmeter, while I wrote a thesis on “Strategies and tools for online reputation management”. I loved the startup feel of the company, loved working with social media, loved the ability to support clients in a variety of industries, so I stayed, growing into the role. I spent 6 years at Blogmeter; worked briefly, just before it shut down, for NM Incite (the joint-venture between Nielsen and McKinsey), and finally moved on the client side in 2015, to put together the Barilla Listening Room.
What has been your biggest achievement?
Without a doubt founding the Consumer Data Hub.
When I joined Reckitt, the company already had a social listening capability but adopted a self-serve approach, which, due to the lean structure and fast paced culture of Reckitt, resulted in hundreds of underutilized queries and dashboards, multiple agencies involved, and social listening being used mostly for very basic use cases. Pivoting to a serviced model not only allowed us to step up the social listening game expanding on the use cases, but gave us the opportunity of combining social with data sources like search and rating and review, and, most importantly, significantly increased efficiency and effectiveness, allowing us to provide insights twice as fast and for half the cost.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
Over the years I’ve worked with a variety of data suppliers, and I’ve been tempted by the ones promising access to exclusive sources. I’ve learned the hard way: if someone is doing something that nobody else can do, there is a good chance what they are offering is not that valuable, or it’s not compliant and won’t be available for long.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I have always found health projects especially rewarding. Being it an exploration of how patients are using a product, a deep dive on specific conditions, or a landscape overview on a category like pain, nothing else brings more to life the “why” of my job: making consumers' voices heard, ensuring we make a positive impact in their life.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
Absolutely. As consumers become more aware of how companies are using their data and privacy concerns increase, so should the attention we put in selecting the right vendors, making sure they are compliant with regulations and platforms terms of service.
As AI tools become more widely available, I believe we are also called to vigil over the accuracy of technologies and possible biases. While I’m a firm believer that social and digital data in general are a gold mine for the right use cases and business questions and I welcome technology that allows us to speed the time to insight, I’m also concerned that the wide availability of tools and data might lead, without vigilance and expertise, to wrong insights and poor decision making.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
We have embedded social intelligence into the most important processes and currently cover most of the use cases, but we are excited by the prospect of evolving what we do and how we do it by integrating new sources like TikTok and Threads, and employing AI.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Reddit. Not only because there is no topic that has not been discussed at length by redditors, but also because of the depth of the conversations on Reddit. Redditors are united by common passions, they tend to be very informed, expert on subject matters, and enjoy sharing their experiences, often providing a better understanding of needs and motivations than other sources.
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