What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I’m the Social Intelligence Lead for Nestle USA. I was brought in and given a blank page in order to build out Nestle USA’s new Social Intelligence capability from scratch, which includes social listening, social audience analysis, social influencer reporting / benchmarking and owned channel performance benchmarking.
2023 was all about bringing in the right tools and establishing the processes; now, 2024 will be focused on building within these tools and bringing in the resourcing needed to support 450+ marketers across 30+ brands.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
After grad school at the VCU Brandcenter, the first few years of my career were in strategic planning & consumer insight roles. I then got an opportunity through a grad school colleague to join M80, the social agency for Audi of America, to build out their social content performance reporting. That’s when I was first exposed to this new concept of “social listening”, which we implemented in time to be the first brand to ever include a hashtag in their Super Bowl ad. Fast forward a couple years and a couple Super Bowl ad campaigns later, including a couple massive moments for Audi with the social listening driven #WantAnR8 campaign and the Super Bowl blackout moment (calling out the Mercedes Benz Superdome), and I had fallen in love with the power of social listening. That’s when I decided to specialize in social listening, building out MediaCom’s Social Insights team (after MediaCom acquired M80) to support brands like Pennzoil and Marriott, and then ultimately join NorthStar to found their Social Intelligence practice that built out the capability for Hilton and others. Years later, I’m still in love with social listening, and the broader Social Intelligence space, where I continue to specialize.
What has been your biggest achievement?
It’s hard not to pick one of the Super Bowl moments, but I think that ultimately I’d have to go with founding NorthStar’s Social Intelligence Practice. I was contracting with NorthStar on a digital analytics project and saw that many Fortune 500 brands did not have strong in-house social listening capabilities, not to mention the thousands of smaller organizations that could benefit from social listening, such as research firms, small agencies, etc. NorthStar gave me a shot, and not only did we succeed in bringing on clients large and small, but we also gained a partnership with Sports Pro Media after they noticed a real-time Super Bowl Social Listening webinar I hosted during the game. That led to NorthStar being tapped as Sports Pro’s go-to consultancy for its annual 50 Most Marketable Athletes list (based heavily on the athletes’ social content performance), which caught the eye of BBC Sports and other outlets. I’m proud to say that NorthStar’s Social Intelligence Practice is thriving to this day, including the partnership with Sports Pro.
All that being said…I hope that my future answer to this question will be “seeing Nestle USA’s best-in-class Social Intelligence capability thrive, which I built from scratch.”
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
Thinking I needed to say ‘yes’ to every opportunity. When I was first getting started building NorthStar’s capability, I was eager to land every interested client. While that sometimes included organizations willing to invest appropriately in my services, other times the budget simply wasn’t there despite the eagerness to work with me. On one occasion, this led me to bend over backwards to say ‘yes’ to a small organization that didn’t fully value what I was providing, and me working harder and harder for lower and lower rates. Soon, I was working many late nights for little return, missing out on family time, and ultimately burning out.
That’s when I learned the power of ‘no’. Instead of saying ‘yes’ just to get another logo on your client roster (or another internal stakeholder), it’s OK to push back and state your true value (your true rates…the true value of your time…what you are truly worth). If they can’t meet that budget or turnaround expectation, then say ‘no’; if they go elsewhere, so be it…you’ll be happier in the long run, and will have more time to develop more meaningful relationships with those who see your true worth.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I’ve gotten to work on many big brands and big campaigns over the years, but where I feel I got the most satisfaction was supporting a state health department during the pandemic as they were looking to evaluate positive advocacy vs. negative detraction towards the upcoming vaccine, within their state. I felt like I was making a difference in our world at a very important moment.
So, my dream project would likely be something similar. More than working on some groundbreaking innovation, my dream project would be working on an initiative that is rooted in a long-term cause that aligns with my values and makes the world a better place. How cool would it be to tell my kids (and potentially future grandkids way down the line) that I used social intelligence analysis to help our planet, or help some important cause that makes their future brighter?
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
Absolutely. Given that I came from a consumer insights background before specializing in social intelligence, I know the important value of surveys, focus groups and other “traditional” research methodologies that provide a true representation of the general population. That’s why I’ve been successful approaching market researchers (and currently sitting within a Consumer Insights organization partnering with market researchers), showing them how social listening and other social intelligence methodologies complement their current “traditional” research methodologies.
The worst thing you can do is come in making hot-take, provocative statements like “social listening is the world’s biggest focus group”, because all you are doing is putting off the market researcher in the room who has worked for 30 years or more on surveys, focus groups and other rigorously designed research studies that represent the general population (yes, guess what, not everyone across every demographic and psychographic segment is actively posting on social about every topic in the world…shocker, right?!?).
Pitch social data as a fantastic complement to other research methodologies, and you create friends in the insights world; not as a replacement, which can often make someone in “traditional” research perceive you as their enemy.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
Yes, there are many areas on my 3-year Social Intelligence Roadmap for Nestle USA that won’t be achieved right away, and will have to wait until I’ve got the foundational building blocks (the right tools, processes and resources) in place.
Sure, we need to track all brand, competitor, product category and cultural trend conversation to inform my many varied stakeholders across Nestle. Sure, I’m excited for some of the partners I’m already making within Nestle, such as the Foresight team that sees my social trend predictions as a crucial insights engine for their cultural movement analysis.
But for example, one area that will take longer is developing the social data models that can accurately predict brand health/equity fluctuations, and even sales. Year 1 at Nestle just finished this week, and was all about getting the right foundation in place. Year 2 will be about democratizing the insights to fuel product innovation, brand relevancy, and macro-trend prediction. But Year 3 is when I’ll be able to show senior leadership teams how social data can help predict the performance of their bottom line. That’s when Social Intelligence will get a seat at the leadership table and fully prove its long-term value.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Honestly, I’m not really that into picking a specific data source that I like more than another. Instead, I like when I can use multiple data sources across social & digital platforms to tell a story or identify a larger cultural trend that’s going to create an opportunity for my company to move the needle.
In fact, telling separate stories from different data sources can sometimes hurt your perceived value among your stakeholder groups. It can create situations where a stakeholder may say “oh, that’s only a few people on Twitter”, or “that’s just one sub-Reddit”, followed by the dreaded “why should I care?”.
So I would encourage us as an industry to not get so caught up on our “favorite” data source. They should all work hand-in-hand to identify actionable insights that tell a cohesive consumer story.
That being said, I can mention the platform that has annoyed me the most over the last year, simply because they decided on the worst rebrand in the history of marketing…
I refuse to call it “X”, Elon…it will always be “Twitter”!
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