What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I am the Social Insights Lead at Samsung Europe.
My job is to understand the social/digital signals, reactions, opinions and experiences of the internet in relation to our brand, categories, campaigns and competitors.
I work across all product categories, ranging from smartphones, to TVs, to washing machines, to name a few. As a regional lead, I operate a hub and spoke model to our 43 European markets.
A primary use case is the analysis of initial reactions to our product launches, such as our recent S24 flagship smartphone announcement event. To understand what resonates with audiences, surfacing pain and pleasure points to our products and how these evolve over time. This is so we can gauge awareness, interest and intent towards our products vs previous years and competitors. In addition, to understand where we need to dial up/down comms around key themes/features, and drilling down into them where required.
Other use cases include, benchmarking against key competitors. Managing and monitoring brand health and crisis related to all of our products and categories. Trend spotting unknown unknowns. Consumer experience of our products in the wild with real consumers. Influencer performance, management and selection. Tracking campaign and partnership activity.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
In my formative years, my fascination with social media and emerging technology sparked during my uni days, when it was the shiny new toy. As a tech enthusiast, I keenly assisted family and friends in managing their social channels for their small businesses, which helped to learn about the backend analytics and insights.
However, a pivotal moment came when I landed a once in a life time role in Marketing for the London 2012 Olympics Games – a dream gig for a sports-mad Londoner. While initially drawn to social media management, my attention swiftly shifted to social listening, igniting my curiosity.
This is where I discovered parallels from my degree in Sport & Exercise Science with a career I gravitated towards. From analysing, understanding and optimising human performance data to instead, applying this in a marketing context using social data.
This is where my social listening journey began; carving a path in social/digital analytics and insights as an ‘early adopter’ in roles that did not really exist prior to that.
Over the years, I honed my experience at renowned global agencies across advertising, PR, research, and social. Working with some of the world’s most iconic brands.
What has been your biggest achievement?
I’m very privileged to have worked on some of the worlds most renowned brands across diverse industries like; Tech, FMCG, Sport, Entertainment, Luxury, Alcohol, Automotive, Travel, Retail, and Gaming. These experiences have not only broadened my perspective but also enabled me to challenge conventions, experiment with innovative ideas, and drive impactful change.
At Samsung, amidst a supportive team and empowering leadership, my biggest achievement lies in revolutionising how we harness social/digital data, unlocking invaluable insights that fuel Samsung's growth and consumer-centric approach across our diverse product categories. Ultimately evolving and elevating our practices from social listening to social intelligence, and championing social data for the business.
From pioneering new methodologies to fostering strategic partnerships with stakeholders and vendors. To orchestrating a shift towards proactive insights generation and planning. By implementing multi-market governance frameworks, and bespoke use-case dashboards. To building research case studies for social data both as a complimentary source to other traditional CMI research approaches, as well as primer for research where we would not otherwise get that granularity of data (e.g. surveys, focus groups). Whilst juggling a couple of regional tool migrations/implementations thrown in for good measure.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
Early in my career, I faced the challenge of analysis paralysis, a common pitfall in social intelligence. Eager to impress, I delved too deeply into exploration down a rabbit hole, losing sight of the client's needs and overspending valuable time. This mistake taught me a crucial lesson: to prioritise the brief, even when tempted by intriguing possibilities.
I embraced this lesson, learning to focus on the brief and manage time effectively. As it’s always better to surprise and delight afterwards, time permitting.
Implementing milestone check-ins became a game-changer, allowing me to course-correct and tease future ideas while staying on track. I realised that experimentation is vital in social intelligence, and failure is just a stepping stone to growth.
Through these experiences, I developed decisiveness and resilience, essential qualities in navigating my journey in social intelligence. I now approach challenges with as much confidence and curiosity, knowing that every misstep is an opportunity to refine my skills and uncover innovative solutions.
What would be your dream project to work on?
As a big football fan I would love to work with arguably the biggest spectacle in sport – the FIFA World Cup.
Although I’ve worked on several sporting events previously; Euros, Rugby World Cup, Wimbledon, this has been for key sponsors. Having experienced the Olympics, and had the pleasure to go to several events, as well as opening/closing ceremonies, the World Cup could possibly be the only other event that could trump it. I’m sure there could be a business case to be required to be at all the important matches to!
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
It's essential to acknowledge both the potential benefits and pitfalls of using social data. While social data can provide valuable insights into consumer behaviour, attitudes, and trends, there is a right and wrong way to interpret and use this information.
Using KPIs in isolation without considering the broader context can lead to misinterpretation. For instance, solely relying on high mention volume as an indicator of successful awareness or demand overlooks critical factors like sentiment. Without factoring in sentiment or triangulating the data with other sources, the interpretation may be incomplete or misleading.
To mitigate the risks, it must be approached with caution and stakeholders should understand its limitations and best practices. Therefore, it requires ongoing education, clear objectives, thoughtful briefs and a nuanced understanding of the evolving social intelligence landscape, to ensure the data is interpreted correctly.
A mantra we’ve started to share internally is ‘just because we can, it doesn’t mean we should’, this is in reference to using social listening for anything and everything, as we’ve now begun challenging stakeholders on their objectives with the data, which stimulates a more thoughtful brief, or in some cases agreement that the effort is not worth the reward.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
‘Can you get TikTok data?’ - the most common data source question I get from stakeholders. Whilst some tools can explore TikTok data, but unfortunately, it has yet to become available on incumbent tools, and it is something that would require a proof of concept to win over commercial teams. Which can be frustrating at a large brand, as processes and budget cycles can potentially be prohibitive.
Good news it that TikTok data is on the horizon; with rumours circulating that the APIs are opening open up soon, so it will not be long until we can take advantage of the in demand data.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
I am going to be boring and suggest Twitter (X) – still can’t bring myself to call it by its new name! Arguably, one of the original sources of which the social listening practice has been built on. Whilst Twitter (X) advertising spends have reduced, and users have been flocking away, it still has enough users as the ‘global town square’ to continue to be a valuable source of unfiltered and unstructured data.
For Samsung, its mission critical that we can gather real-time signals, reactions, and opinions, especially when there is an expectation to gather data at scale in a short space of time.
As an active Twitter (X) user, I often find myself browsing and stumbling across useful insights through their interest topics that provide new territories to explore altogether or add new dimensions to existing thinking. To the point, I end up emailing tweets to my work profile to follow up on.
Therefore, whilst some data sources can be richer for insights, Twitter (X) is effective for our use cases and home of many consumer tech communities, especially due to its API, which is not hamstrung when location filters are applied, like some of the other sources.
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