What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I’m really a woman of many hats and so I’ve never felt that one job title really encompasses all that I do. I’m in the system as a Lead Analyst, but that’s only a small part of what I do. My job is not only to analyse social data, but to figure out why we should care about it at the BBC. That in a nutshell captures everything from understanding how Peaky Blinders changed the men’s haircut market, to figuring out what we can do to stay relevant to audiences we don’t serve so well. On top of this, I make sure we’re always keeping up to date with the best tools on the market so our journalists and content producers can get the information they need to make their compelling and world class articles and posts.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
My background is heavily research based. It sounds boring on paper, but I’ve always been a curious and kind of nosey person. I’ve always asked the questions and have been compelled to journey through messy data to find the answers. It’s why I was interested in journalism as a student. I started working early on in the social media days at MTV Networks in New York and it was just this ‘internet thing’ that no one in the research department was doing anything with. I remember trying to talk about YouTube to a producer at Vh1 in the elevator and they were amazed, but they didn’t think it was a massive threat. Oh how the world has changed! From there, I moved to the UK to do online video analytics, then broader printed & online research, and then I just became this specialist in digital research & analytics. It helps to have been there from the start with the analytics platforms because I understand the market so well. The passion to find the story and stay curious has stuck with me. It’s made it hard to ever move away from research!
What has been your biggest achievement?
I find it hard to say I’ve ever done anything on my own at work. There’s a collective, collaborative, and intelligent team that works with me. We’ve done some amazing things, especially with the amount of data from the BBC at your fingertips. We’ve exposed sexism, racism, ableism, and classism in sports, recruitment, media representation, and online platforms. We’ve helped the BBC realise that social mentions can lead to TV viewership, and exposed the value of fandoms.
Personally, the work I’m most proud of is still on-going. Social practitioners are exposed to harmful, violent, and/or sexual content on a regular basis and it can leave lasting psychological damage on them. Often, when junior analysts join the field, they don’t understand they are at risk of vicarious trauma. It’s something that I myself have experienced and it’s complicated and scary. It’s part of my mission to make the internet a safer place for analysts and also put policies and practices in place to help analysts manage their exposure to harmful content and seek help when they need it.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
It’s hard for me to think of a ‘mistake’, I’m sure I’ve made one, but I’m just not inclined to think that way. As I mentioned before. I’m really curious so I tend to take a ‘test and learn’ approach which is a different mindset. One of my biggest learning moments was when we tried to democratise social listening across the business. At first, we gave our own training sessions and setup logins as and when they were needed. When you’re looking at a business as big as the BBC, it quickly doesn’t become scalable. In one of our global journalist teams, there were 500 people alone, all needing training, logins, and specialist query building lessons in a different language! We were only a team of 2 so we quickly needed to pivot to a new way of working. We enlisted our supplier colleagues and incorporated a ‘social champions’ network to help us spread the training load.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I’m a mum, so if I ever got to work on a project that made a change for the better for my kids, that would be the dream. I’m really big on supporting people to achieve their goals, so anything that helps someone see their dream come true would make me incredibly happy.
Also, if I ever got to work with LEGO I would die of bliss. I collect it and build it with my sons and we are big fans.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
There is absolutely a wrong way to use it. I’ve never felt that using social data in isolation. It’s best in context with other research and data. This is where you’ll get more insight on the why and what now. I’ve seen too many analysts stick a few charts or numbers on slides and think that that’s the job done. If you want good stakeholder buy-in and real impact. You need to tell a story about the data and that involves context, a plotline, and a bit of drama.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
At the BBC, we use social data everywhere we can - and this is mostly due to the work I’ve done to embed it into the business, but there’s always room to grow. I think we could be doing more to understand fandoms and their impact on the brand as a whole. We struggle at times to understand the full brand architecture on social media and I’d like us to be doing more around understanding perception amongst audience groups. There’s also not much development in analysing video data so we’re a bit stuck when it comes to getting the most from TikTok and YouTube. We know there’s loads there, but it’s not transcribed so that we can use text analysis to find information.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I still love vox pops and getting data straight from the audiences’ mouth, so it’s the reason I love TikTok, and any video data. It’s also the source most likely to cause harm to analysts since there’s a lot of unfiltered graphic content, so I say it’s my favourite cautiously, but nothing makes you smile or surprises you like hearing the audience tell you why they love your brand.
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