What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I manage the Social Media Intelligence portfolio at BMO and my job title is Sr. Manager- Social Media Intelligence.
I am lucky to work at a place where social intelligence insights are becoming an integral part of decision making across various teams. From understanding the market to performance of various products and services, to utilizing the capabilities for building a brand defense mechanism, BMO is fully vested in exploring the power of social media intelligence.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I have been working in data/ insights for the longest part of my career, including web metrics, consumer insights, social insights, etc. Honestly, I got into Social listening by accident! Prior to social listening I was working in consumer insights and during my time at Kraft Canada, the senior leadership started discussing social media listening. We did have a subscription to Radian6 but no one has actively explored the capability of this source of data. Luckily during that time, the Director of Consumer Insights at Kraft HQ in Chicago started showing interest in social listening, exploring different vendors and capabilities, and working on incorporating the insights with other data sources. And they needed someone at the Canada office to do the same. I put my hand up and the journey began. I flew to Chicago, met various vendors, understood the capabilities, attended multiple trainings, and brought back all the learnings to Canada to kickstart formal integration and uptake of social listening within the organization. During that I realized how much I enjoyed this field and have stuck to it since!
What has been your biggest achievement?
I have two of them :) The first one is from a few years ago when I built a social media intelligence program for the company I used to work with. When I joined that organization, there was nothing with respect to SMI - no strategy, no reporting, no uptake, and a lack of stakeholder buy-in. Over a period of time, I built the entire framework from the ground up, including a strategy, onboarding a vendor, stakeholder education & buy-in, reporting cadence,etc.
The second achievement is from a few months ago during an acquisition that my current company made. SMI played a pivotal role in providing data and insights from the day of the announcement to finalizing the acquisition. The data and insights from listening enabled the bank to undergo a smooth transition and supported the bank's transition to become the 8th largest bank in North America. The bank’s use of social intelligence during this transition was also highlighted in an article published by a leading national daily!
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
I think this would be my early years in the field where I assumed that everyone is as excited about the potential of social listening as I was. I would go into meetings that everyone understands what listening is and are ready to jump on the option of exploring insights from social media data. I soon realized how wrong I was and that for social intelligence to be considered an “insights resource”, the stakeholders need to be educated on what SMI is and what it brings to the table. I now go into the meetings assuming that while my stakeholders might have heard of listening, they may not understand its capabilities and how it can support their use cases. Having this dialogue enables me to not only better understand their needs, but also ensures that I provide the right solution to them.
What would be your dream project to work on?
This is an interesting question and not something that I have ever thought about. I have been working in this space for 10 years now (can you imagine!) and there hasn’t been a single year I have regretted this career switch. I love each project I have worked on, may it be advocating/ educating stakeholders on what SMI is and how it can contribute to business success, to building the Social Intelligence framework for the company or enhancing its capabilities. What I love about this field is that there is never a dull moment, it is ever evolving and there is always something new to learn. Maybe one day when things get static, I might think of a dream project!
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
I think as long as you understand the what and why of the data you are using, it is right. A majority of the time, social media trends/ activities are very short lived and what may qualify as being “viral” in one industry may be just an average in another industry. As long as you are able to contextualize the data and ensure that it is understood with the lens of the industry you are analyzing/ researching, it is accurate. This is something I learned working at an agency, where the clients ranged from makeup companies to beer companies. Having an understanding of how social media plays out in each industry is the key to making the use of social data successful.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
Not a specific area, but I would like to see Social media intelligence at a level where 'Primary Research' is within various organizations. With increasing emphasis on data and insights, it will be great if organizations think of social intelligence as a key source of data similar to other sources, incorporating social intelligence in the end to end process; from planning to implementation. While some of the companies have started doing this to a certain extent, there is still a long way to go.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
I love Reddit! This source is a plethora of knowledge for everything. While it does suffer from the limitations of mining unstructured data, but, the extent of insights that this source can provide are unbeatable. I think the Reddit community is opinionated and authentic versus some of the other sources, hence, the insights that this source provides are unique and to a large extent actionable, especially when it comes to innovation, new product launch or development, campaign performance, etc. While it is time consuming to derive insights from this source and the risk of getting lost in the rabbit hole of threads is high, it is totally worth it.
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