What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
My title is Social Listening Manager at the NFL. We use social listening in the following ways:
- Measure success and provide fan feedback for marketing, events, partners, and social initiatives
- Compiling fan sentiment and concerns for sensitive or priority topics within the league such as player health and safety and officiating
- Carry-out social voting initiatives such as Pro Bowl Vote and Walter Payton Man of the Year
- Understand the NFL’s share of voice compared to other domestic leagues and international sports events
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I was first introduced to social listening while working at a social media agency where social listening was included as part of different clients’ scope. I am a problem solver at heart so social listening and all the challenges that come with it from query building to digging for insights really lit a spark in me.
What has been your biggest achievement?
Seeing how social listening reports can impact business decisions no matter how big or small will always be a huge achievement in my book. A big moment for me was using social listening to share insights around the Super Bowl to help inform cross-department strategies.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
Slicing the data in a different way that doesn’t tell the whole story to appease to marketing or social goals. Nothing can really be learned or improved upon when the data isn’t being presented in a truthful way. I learned how to stand my ground on honest reporting and push back on providing metrics that sound good, but don’t tell the whole story.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I would love to use social listening to do fashion trend analysis - I get a newsletter from a company called Spate that essentially emails out a social listening report on the beauty industry and it's so fascinating and fun.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
To me the difference is always about intention and using what is legally available. For example, there is a massive difference in using data to influence or market to someone vs using data to manipulate or exploit someone.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
With upcoming NFL games in Germany and Brazil, it would be amazing to be able to build queries and analyze data in different languages.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
It really depends on what I’m looking for. A large majority of NFL conversation happens on Twitter/X which gives us the most data and demographic information, but Reddit is where a lot of our more involved fans talk about not only the games but other things happening around the league. The insights and conversations happening on Reddit can be more nuanced and insightful when Twitter/X volume can sometimes be more headline-y.
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