Paul Zimmerman

What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?

‍I’m the manager of the team that supports the global social listening insights & social engagement for PepsiCo so we have to be experts in collecting data but also what will drive the business forward. It’s a unique role that works with both IT and the PepsiCo teams together where we need to know all things about social listening while implementing for teams across the globe.

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What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?

‍I used to work at a social intelligence vendor. I was helping the largest companies in the world with their social intelligence needs before moving into the CPG space and working for both Consumer Insights and IT. Working for both vendor and customer sides has increased why I believe social listening is such an important tool to gain insights and push digital transformation projects.

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What has been your biggest achievement?

Helping drive PepsiCo’s digital transformation initiatives with social insights. I’m leading a global initiative to increase the visibility and usage of our social intelligence tools that includes increasing solution adoption, developing use cases and value of social intelligence, showcasing the power of social tools to deliver better consumer insights and working to update social governance at PepsiCo. This has led me to build connections across the PepsiCo ecosystem and shown more teams the power of social.

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What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?

‍My biggest mistake was making the assumption that parts of the business understood what social intelligence can do for consumer insights and engagement. Also, there are a lot of misnomers about social that I needed to dispel. My major take away from this was that with social intelligence we needed to start slow to start moving quickly.

I learned that the benefits of social intelligence were fairly new to the business and I had to take a step back to explain the value of social and how it can benefit larger digital transformation goals. This led my team to develop more in-depth training and examples of what social intelligence can do for the business and also showcase the value of it outside of what the teams already know. In turn, these conversations started talks around using social as means for cost savings, actionability and being more proactive versus the reactive stance the business has taken previously.

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What would be your dream project to work on?

‍I would love to work more closely with our product innovation teams and showcase how much we can learn from consumers on social media and apply that to the products in PepsiCo’s future. I would love to walk into a grocery store and see a product that my team helped deliver and become the next billion dollar brand at PepsiCo.  

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Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?

‍I think it depends on the amount of data you’re reviewing and the biases that you have towards the data before evaluating it. If you’re gathering insights and there are few results, due to search issues or data restrictions/sources and you take that as gospel, you’re not getting the full context of the consumer and your data will be questioned. Also, we all have unconscious biases towards the data we’re investigating so having that be the reason that leads to your conclusion of the data can lead to insights that are not accurate. 

Having a large data set, then being able to analyze it in different ways to better understand the questions you’re trying to solve, will lead to insights you 're even considering. Social allows you to have those large sets of data to analyze and build results versus more traditional data outlets.

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Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?

‍I think we could be much faster with our engagement with consumers via social channels. For example, we could run a contest via social and have immediate winners or immediate conversations with our customers. I think from a customer relations perspective, we can use these engagements to drive product innovation or find an issue faster that can be mitigated before a massive recall or worse. Also, I think we can use social better to create and target audiences and deliver a more personal experience with our brands.

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What’s your favourite data source to use and why?

‍Right now, I love TikTok. While this has changed a bit, there is an authenticity to most of the content that comes with the idea that anything can start to trend, so it has a lot of active engagement. I love to see the trending topic and see what people are most engaging with. Also, the impact of TikTok is real as it starts to blend into other social sources like Instagram or X. I would LOVE to have more ability into the insights of TikTok, but hopefully that is something that can be available in the future.

For the PepsiCo team, product reviews are crucial to learn more individual product insights. I do believe that product reviews are a crucial part of understanding the social landscape and give us the best idea of what consumers feel about our products since they have purchased them. 

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