What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
As Senior Manager, Social Analytics, I lead a team of research analysts who rely exclusively on social media data to help inform critical marketing, programming, and development decisions at Disney Entertainment Television. We use social listening to monitor the health of a brand or show, identify the storylines and characters that resonate with viewers, assess the sentiment around those conversation drivers, and understand the response to specific promotional campaigns and marketing collateral. More broadly, we also use social listening to inform casting decisions, discover influencers, identify whitespace, profile or segment audiences, and track current events related to our brands, partners, or talent.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I didn’t have a direct path to social listening, but I feel like I ultimately found the perfect niche for myself right at the intersection of fan culture and data & analytics.
I’ve always been a bit of a television and pop culture enthusiast, and actually began my career in television production, working for a few reality shows, late-night talk shows, and production companies before going back to school to earn my MBA. After graduate school, I transitioned to more of a data-driven insights role on a direct marketing analytics (CRM) team at Disney.
In the early days of social listening, I started exploring different tools and methodologies to see how we could leverage social data to better understand our fans and enhance our CRM capabilities. As time went on, I continued to work on ad hoc social listening projects while also managing my primary CRM responsibilities. But as our television audiences became increasingly social, the appetite for social insights expanded along with it, and soon, what began as a side project became a fulltime job.
What has been your biggest achievement?
There have definitely been some notable wins along the way, but I think that the very existence of the Social Insights team I lead might be my biggest career achievement so far. This is a function that did not exist when I joined the company, but I was able to demonstrate the need, prove the value, and obtain executive buy-in to hire fulltime resources and develop a new team wholly dedicated to social intelligence.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
I’ve made the mistake of trying to scale up a social listening program too fast by simply replicating tactics that worked for one brand and applying them to others. I learned that there is no one size fits all strategy and what works for one brand, may not have the same results for another. Social listening is not a plug and play solution—it’s an iterative process that needs to be refined and customized for each brand or topic, taking into account the way users talk about the brand at hand (e.g. alternate names, shorthand, user generated hashtags, etc.), where they talk about it (e.g. organic posts on X vs. comments on Instagram vs. dedicated subreddits), and how clean or noisy the specific resulting data set may be.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
Social listening can be a very powerful and valuable resource for understanding the social universe, but I think social data should be used in conjunction with—and not in place of—traditional research methodologies when analyzing the universal response to your brand.
Since social listening involves harnessing existing, unsolicited feedback from customers, it requires less time, financial investment, and coordination to turn around actionable insights compared with traditional surveys and focus groups. It could be tempting for a company to rely solely on social data, but it’s important to recognize and account for its inherent biases. By voicing opinions about your brand on social, social users self-identify as highly engaged hand-raisers who may be predisposed to talking about your brand. They may also be younger or more digital savvy than your core audience. Traditional research will add important context to your social data and help tell a more complete story.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Each platform has its own benefits and challenges when it comes to extracting data. X has obviously gone through a number of changes over the last year or so, but there’s still something about the real-time nature of the platform that really lends itself to social listening for live and linear TV programs. With X data, we can map the minute-by-minute social conversation against live television content, identify the moments, characters, and storylines driving spikes in activity, formulate insights, and even effect change in near-real-time.
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