What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I am the Social Listening & Intelligence Lead at Kraft Heinz. In this role, I provide the functional expertise to drive awareness and adoption of social insights capabilities and value across our North American business.
We have 6 key objectives for leveraging social listening: Brand & Category Conversations, Innovation, Consumer Understanding, Cultural Intelligence & Trends (Fast & Slow), Audience Targeting, and Retailer & Restaurant Insights.
The approach we take across these 6 objectives ranges from tactical social listening to more strategic social intelligence. We provide self-service dashboards for brand health or ongoing trends monitoring, conduct in-depth custom research, and provide routine updates on key strategic initiatives.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I’ve spent my entire career with Kraft Heinz, and over this time I’ve developed a deep passion for our brands and consumers.
I started my career in IT where I had the opportunity to develop & strengthen my technical skills, including software development, systems design/architecture, and Business Intelligence (BI). I was then able to leverage my new BI and system design skills to join and lead the Consumer Relations reporting & data team. As social media became more popular, it became a natural progression that Consumer Relations expands its customer service and listening efforts beyond the contact center, to the rapidly growing social media conversations. Those SQL and VB skills earlier in my career came to be very helpful as I’ve created 1000s of Boolean based queries. Our team of analysts began to actively listen and curate monthly reports to more than 75 brands. Over the past few years, our organization changed and evolved, as did my role. Prior to 2022 when my primary focus became social intelligence, I was responsible for more comprehensive Consumer Conversations, of which social media was still a large part.
What has been your biggest achievement?
Probably not the most popular with my colleagues, but the development of a social media “brand relevance” KPI for the organization was very rewarding. Our leadership challenged us to develop a methodology using social listening to measure the effectiveness of our brand comms and campaigns. It took multiple iterations and many weeks to get consensus on the targets and thresholds. Hundreds of employees across our priority brands were evaluated and measured on how effectively their brand messaging and campaigns resonated across social media. This was especially tough because we had some great campaigns that drove traditional media impressions but seemed to underperform on social media. The intent was to move beyond the traditional campaign ROI metrics to measure whether our creative and messaging was driving brand salience. This was a very stressful project, but also quite rewarding.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
This is more of a “lessons learned” than a bold mistake, but it’s so important to invest time and resources in quality query building and maintenance of your environment. At Kraft Heinz we have over 100 brands and 400+ social assets; add in competitors and other relevant topics over the years and the result is somewhere around 2,500 queries in our system. To make it even more challenging, many of our brands are surnames, family names, or have multiple meanings (“my arms feel like Jell-O”). It was especially embarrassing, while presenting to the brand leadership, to discover that we were missing 1000s of brand mentions because our Boolean for Philadelphia Cream Cheese didn’t include ‘bagel’ or ‘cheesecake’. Having that difficult discussion, or re-publishing your analysis, can be avoided if time is made to maintain your environment. It’s also helpful to sometimes get a 2nd pair of eyes to review your logic or query. The lesson learned is that when you have a lot of brand and people maintaining queries, that constant maintenance and care is necessary.
What would be your dream project to work on?
Hmm… I feel fortunate that my work is still meaningful and rewarding, even after many years in this field.
I’m working on a new way of leveraging social and cultural intelligence for our ‘Away From Home’ business (restaurants and foodservice). The potential impact that social listening can have on this business and their strategy is very exciting.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
While I don’t think there’s any right or wrong way to use social, I do believe it’s important to continue to educate others and set expectations on the benefits and limitations of social listening.
From a benefits standpoint, we know that social listening can uncover valuable insights, but it’s also important to recognize that it’s one of many sources, not the only source. We can turn to social as a diagnostic to solve a brand question, but at times the answer may not be there. We may identify consumer trends through social, but further research is required to validate those findings. Depending on where it’s being used in your organization, it can stand alone or be a valued complement to other research methods.
From a limitation standpoint, we don’t have access to all social platforms and/or content; and we need to continue to remind our internal clients of this. An example that many, if not all, of us can relate to is the demand for TikTok. While there have been some huge advancements in recent years, TikTok remains to be a massive challenge to monitor and measure. Facebook and Instagram are loaded with amazing insights, but they too are significantly limited beyond our owned media.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
As much as we try to deliver social listening insights across the organization, it seems there will always be opportunities to take it further. We all are working with very limited resources, so it’s critical that we drive adoption and usage of social listening technology across the organization. We tend to give priority of our services to our Brand & Marketing functions, however there are huge opportunities to expand social listening within Sales, R&D and Quality, just to name a few. There’s an abundance of social and online review insights on retailers and shopper behavior that our Sales team can leverage. For R&D, there are tons of conversations about food & dieting trends, what to eat and what not to eat. Our Quality team can gain actionable insights by leveraging social and online ratings & reviews.
We will always have resource challenges, and my goal is to drive adoption and hands-on use of social listening beyond my team.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
I’ve become a big fan of Reddit over the past few years. As we’ve taken on more social listening projects to understand culture and fandoms, the amount and quality of conversations available on Reddit has been valuable. People are turning to Reddit, and other Forums, to connect with people with similar interests, or sometimes personal challenges. I’ve found myself reading through Reddit whether for brands or macro-topics (i.e. Inflation), and have come across some very real and powerful insights. I feel that when looking to better understand consumer or human behavior, Reddit is full of very specific and robust conversations.
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