What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I am the Director of Social Intelligence at Paramount Advertising. My team is tasked with empowering ad sales partners with rich, social media insights that fuel client conversations, inspire marketing ideation, and drive revenue. We use social listening specifically to help bring to life Paramount’s audiences, regardless of whether they are consuming our content on linear television, streaming services, online, or on social media. Social listening allows us to tout the fact that we have some of the most talked about programs across the linear and streaming ecosystem, but also that our content and campaigns truly resonate with viewers from a sentiment and emotional perspective. This is something that is super important to our advertising partners. The insights we are able to gather from social listening data helps to prove the value of our audiences to advertisers.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
My first job out of business school was at an NYC based technology startup. I landed a marketing job where one of the many things I got to dabble in was social media. I helped run the company’s social accounts, doing everything from creating content to posting, and even engaging with and listening to our small follower community. I guess you could say I was doing social listening before I fully acknowledged it as a research discipline. After a couple great years, I landed my first role in media research at NBCUniversal. This is where I began to truly fall in love with social media research. I was hired as a cross-platform ad sales researcher, but eventually found a niche as the team’s social lead. A couple years later, I joined Ipsos’s Social Intelligence Analytics team to fully immerse myself in social listening.
What has been your biggest achievement?
It’s difficult for me to pinpoint a single achievement. Personally, I feel very proud of my education, but also other very meaningful things like finding a loving partner, home ownership, dog ownership (arguably more important than home), and so many other little big personal wins. From a career perspective, I feel fortunate to have worked at some truly iconic companies, but more importantly to work alongside so many bright minds. I’ve learned more than I could ever imagine from my colleagues and built some deep relationships along the way. Furthermore, I’m proud to say that I have gotten to the point in my career where I feel empowered to give back to young people through training and mentorship. It feels good to pay it forward.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
I have made too many to count, but one thing I always think about is how closed off I was early in my career. I wanted to do everything myself because asking for help or guidance would be a burden to others. This generated a lot of unnecessary frustration, anxiety, and burnout. It honestly took me years to realize how valuable it is to network, build authentic relationships, and ask for help. Most people enjoy helping others, so now I try to encourage young people to not make the same mistake.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I worked a Fifa World Cup so my dream project has been fulfilled… let me tell you about it. No, but seriously, I’m a sports fan so it would likely be something in sports (ideally soccer as the Americans call it). It would have to be a project that had a tangible long-lasting impact on society, so I feel as though it might have to be an entrepreneurial venture later on in life. It’s not something I have given deep thought to, but as a lifelong soccer player, I’ve frequently thought about all of the untapped youth talent in the world. Maybe there is an opportunity to better leverage social media for talent discovery, especially in under-developed areas of the world? I don’t know, but I’m going to stay up all night thinking about my business idea, so stay tuned!
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
Absolutely. Social data is incredibly powerful as it is unprompted, real-time, and rich with human perspective and emotion. It comes from diverse sources, in diverse formats, and should also be admired for its accessibility and flexibility. It continues to be more affordable than many datasets and it truly can fit in just about anywhere when used appropriately.
However, social data does not always need to be the star of the show and sometimes it doesn’t need to be at the show at all. Many times, social data just needs to do the job of adding qualitative context or validate findings present in robust quantitative or qualitative data. It is also common that the desired insights simply don’t exist in social data (maybe people aren’t talking about it?) or only a partial answer presents itself. As practitioners, we need to do a better job of embracing this and accepting that there is a need to look to other data sources for validation and/or additional insight. In my opinion, social data will never replace a nationally representative survey or traditional qualitative studies. Social data does not have all the answers and that is ok, but it does have many admirable super powers.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
There aren’t any clear new areas where we should be using social data. However, there is definitely a huge opportunity to lean further into certain areas like creative strategy, campaign reporting, and thought leadership.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Reddit is one of my favorites because it's so rich with insightful conversations on such a vast array of topics. I continue to think it's undervalued and overlooked as an insights hub by many researchers.
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