What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
Executive Director, Global Corporate Strategy Insights
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
While attending graduate school to attain a Masters in Psychology, I started working as a marketing research analyst conducting surveys and focus groups. I went on to lead the consumer insights role at Universal Music Group bringing my years of quantitative and qualitative research to firmly establish utilizing consumer insights in our distribution and growth strategies. The need to actively understand and monitor how fans were interacting and engaging with our artists led to introducing social listening as a central methodology.
What has been your biggest achievement?
My biggest achievement was nurturing a global team of social media analysts to become industry experts. Those on the team not only became the go-to social experts for digital marketing and corporate communication teams across the entire global ecosystem at Warner Bros. Discovery, but those who have moved on have made a lasting impact at the companies they now call home.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
Prior to understanding what social listening was, I was quick to dismiss random tweets as simply that - random! As someone trained in quantitative and qualitative methodologies for consumer research, I felt the only way to understand audience behavior and preferences needed the rigorous sampling methodologies that traditional market research demanded. Working in entertainment, one thing that quickly became evident was that things shifted quickly with audiences who were increasingly more likely to consume content and share their thoughts digitally. Social intelligence allows real-time understanding of audience growth and sentiment with a global scale, and is a strong companion to traditional research methodologies. Since my initial dismissal, I’ve worked to ensure social intelligence plays a role in the overall data collection strategies we use across the company to better make decisions for our content and our brands.
What would be your dream project to work on?
As a lifelong racing fan, race car driver, and sim racer, it would be a dream to be attached to a project on how to further drive fan engagement with a racing team or racing series.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
There isn't necessarily a right or wrong way to use social data. The effectiveness of social listening depends on how well the available data aligns with the business question to provide valuable insights. Social data requires vigilant monitoring of data quality and understanding of vocal bias. To use social data the ‘right’ way, one needs to understand the context and the audience, allowing companies to real-time monitor, benchmark against previous engagements, engage audiences, and support iterative deep dive research.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
While social data is taken into consideration for many aspects of our decision making process, it is only lightly taken into consideration for green lighting projects. Efforts by myself and my team have led to increased interest in doing so, but being involved in decision making earlier in the creative process could potentially lead to more streamlined efforts during the digital marketing stage after the project has already been created.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Reddit. While the succinctness of comments on X, Instagram, YouTube, etc is well appreciated, the in-depth explanation people give on Reddit is fascinating. The communities people have self-created and gravitated towards allow researchers to have a in-depth understanding of trends and interests of both pop culture and niche audiences. In the future, TikTok is likely going to be a favorite source when greater capabilities in comment mining occurs as audiences (especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha) increasingly favor the platform to share their interests.
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