What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
My job title is Manager, Consumer Insight. In my role I lead both the social listening team and the survey text analytics team for the Consumer Insight department in Disney Experiences. My team uses social listening to support a wide variety of departments with use cases such as brand health, product launch reporting, category analysis, campaign tracking, customer journey, and many more!
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I’ve been working in social listening for the past 10 years, first as an analyst at Disney in early 2014. When I was hired as an analyst, I had no formal social listening experience, but I had completed two different internships at Disney and two social media internships at external agencies. I got into social listening because the leader of the newly created social listening team, thought that my combination of social media and Disney experience was a great starting point and that she could teach me the rest. I’m grateful every day that she did!
What has been your biggest achievement?
More than any project, the experience of building my team and watching them grow and thrive in their roles has been the greatest honor of my career. I have hired so many intelligent and creative people over the past 8 years, and getting to work with them makes me better every day. When I first assumed responsibility for social listening, it was just me and an intern, and now our team is 12 people in total! Making the case for additional headcount over the years, and working with my department’s leadership to combine social listening with our text analytics group took a lot of effort, but it has allowed us to accomplish so much more together than anyone thought was possible.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
One specific mistake doesn’t come to mind, but something my team & I pride ourselves on is failing fast. We aren’t afraid to try new things that might not work out, whether that’s a new tool, methodological approach, or reporting style. The key is being able to quickly evaluate if what we tried worked, and if it didn’t, what we can learn from it moving forward. I believe this type of open mindedness is key when you work in an emerging field of research.
What would be your dream project to work on?
If Disney Experiences were to open a new domestic theme park, that would be an absolute dream to support. My team has done extensive reporting on new land openings over the years such as Galaxy’s Edge and Pandora: The World of Avatar. We’ve also supported many new individual attractions and nighttime shows as they’ve been added or changed over the years. But a brand new theme park would be an amazing challenge to capture and analyze from a social listening perspective.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
I think there are right and wrong ways to use just about any data source, but it’s a bit more nuanced than a purely black and white perspective. There are significantly better and worse ways to use social media data that can vary based on external factors like company, industry, availability of other sources, and what questions you are trying to answer. This is a big reason why my team has a detailed intake process for new requests, to make sure we are applying the right source and approach to answer the questions our partners have!
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
While my team occasionally does this type of work, I’d like to do significantly more support for product ideation and development in the future. I think social listening can be such an interesting starting point for brainstorming and the creation of new products for our consumers. Social media posts are a great jumping off point for ideation because they are completely unsolicited, and can be collected quickly to stay timely and relevant in the market. Social intelligence also lends itself well to a qual-meets-quant approach that I think many creative people respond better to than purely quantitative data.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
It varies of course, but right now I’m really enjoying using Reddit as a source for deep insight. I think the anonymity, community aspect, and availability of niche interest groups makes it a very unique source. It’s almost like a virtual community panel! That being said, my team typically reports on topics in aggregate across a multitude of platforms and sources so we can get a mix of short form and long form content, representation of different demographics, and a combination of text, visual, and video data.
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