What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I have the pleasure of being the Social Insights Director at VML. At VML we have a dedicated Social Insights Team, whose job it is to live and breathe social media research and insights. As a team we run bespoke digital research programmes for our clients, develop custom tools and solutions in partnership with our Data Science Team, and generally support the wider agency on their social research needs.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
While I fell into social by chance, I’d always had an interest in advertising – a given really when you grow up with parents who are serial entrepreneurs. Early on I landed a role in marketing at GoDaddy, a web hosting company. A place where I had one of the strangest days of my career, running around London hand delivering 4-inch figurines of Freddie Flintoff to prominent sporting journalists. But also, the place where I got to try my hand at community management, paid social and of course social listening. Since GoDaddy, I’ve remained in the social listening industry - working for both agencies and vendor-side on some well-known names.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
Over my career I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing brands and clients. I’ve run social insight programmes and projects for the likes of Pandora Jewellery, Twitch, Edrington UK and King’s College London – to name a few.
At the end of 2023, I was particularly proud to see Duracell launching their first festive campaign in 5 years. It features the Duracell Bunny saving Santa from a Christmas blackout by running to the rescue and changing the batteries in Rudolph’s nose. This campaign is close to my heart as my team conducted the social listening research which was the first step in the campaign’s development.
Over the course of December 2022, we’d tracked parents’ Christmas conversations. We then delved into these conversations looking at what drove parental chatter. Presents were the undeniable largest driver of conversation. The chatter was beautifully rich and passionate, full of anecdotes about the magic of Christmas morning and the sparkle in children’s eyes.
The only topic that didn’t feature was – you guessed it – batteries. Well, it did, but it was less than 1% of the total conversation. Batteries, the thing essential to toys come Christmas morning and to powering the festive season was not on the radar of parents. This became the insight for the campaign.
Kantar ranked the advert one of the top 15 of Christmas 2023 while System 1 gave it a star ranking of 5.4.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
That social listening can answer everything. Unfortunately, not every brand or topic is discussed in huge volumes online. For example, you’re unlikely to find masses of conversation on tomato passata. But, if you were to analyse searches of tomato passata in an SEO tool you’d see queries on recipes, substitutes and so on – you could probably get down to seasonality of certain meals.
In many cases, and as general best practice, there is a need to supplement social findings with other data types and research methodologies, such as VML’s Cognitive Intelligence product. To bolster insights where mentions volumes are limited and to enrich insights beyond the social media context.
Any nightmare clients?
‘Nightmare’ feels a touch dramatic; I can’t say I’ve had a nightmare client – whether that be an internal or external stakeholder. But I would suggest that there have been historically some recurring barriers social insights professionals face – regardless of whether they work for a brand, agency, or vendor.
Common barriers include stakeholders who believe social data should never be used as it isn’t nationally representative in the same way survey data is. Those who refuse to believe that X (Twitter) is valuable as a source of data, particularly if they are not spending on the channel. Or those that view social as a quick, low investment method to arrive at an insight.
These issues are driven in most-part by a lack of stakeholder education. As social research has become more commonplace, we’ve seen the range of key stakeholders grow – and they no longer necessarily work in a marketing department. For instance, I have personally worked on projects where the results were to be used as evidence in court. Ultimately, it is our job as practitioners to act as partners to our clients to show where social data can provide business value.
Is there anything you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
Well, we can’t give it all away! But I would say that social data is beautifully rich – there is a reason it is referred to as the world’s largest focus group. However, there is a consistent complaint from social insights professionals - that our ability to derive insights from social data is limited by the tools and technology available to analyse it. In other words, you’re only ever as good as the pre-existing solutions that exist within the industry.
I have lost count of the number of professionals I have spoken to who have referenced having to take data out of social listening platforms to get to the intelligence they desire. For me, this is the biggest missed opportunity for both vendors and professionals. Professionals relying solely on the existing solutions in the market; and vendors not offering productised options for customisation.
At VML, we of course have access to a range of leading social solutions – but we aren’t limited by them. Where social solutions can’t deliver on our needs or those of our clients, we work with our Data Science Department to bridge the gap. Our partnerships, such as that with LinkedIn, have enabled us to develop our own content intelligence solutions for our B2B clients. We’ve developed frameworks for analysing brands’ places in culture. We’ve combined multiple machine learning methods to create sentiment models for bespoke use cases – such as detecting abuse in football fan tweets. Remind me of that pesky issue identifying sarcasm again?
Who had made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes
The person who has made the biggest lasting impression on me is Virginia Alvarez; one of my first managers in ad land and current Head of Insights & Effectiveness at VML. Virginia initiated my love of audience intelligence; the craft of creating a full view of the consumer through a myriad of signals and touchpoints – and the importance of social as a data source in developing this understanding.
On the point of audience intelligence, I also have to callout the team over at Audiense – Carlos Serra, Javier Buron and Luke White. True vendor partners who have kindly let me play a small part in Audiense’s journey from time-to-time. It has been an inspiration to see them elevate Audiense’s proposition over the years from best-in-class audience segmentation methodologies to integrations with panel data providers.
Finally, I feel it would be remiss not to acknowledge Jillian Ney here. I met Jillian when I was only a few months into industry and have since watched her build the Social Intelligence Lab into what it is today. It is the only organisation of its kind for our industry; and I personally have felt the benefits of Jillian’s work.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
My crystal ball is at the cleaners, but my money would be on vendors trying to shorten the data to insight gap. The reason for this is two-fold.
Firstly, we’ve got more data now than ever before, in an increasingly fragmented social media landscape. According to data from Statista in 2023 the average person globally spent 151 minutes on social per day. To put things into perspective, that’s up 68% since 2012; up 13% since 2017 and up 3% VS 2022. Further, we’re seeing a shifting social media landscape with the rise of TikTok and a rather tumultuous couple of years over at X (Twitter).
Secondly, the expectations of the industry are shifting against a tide of rising maturity. The emphasis today is firmly on intelligence over listening. The frequency of requests for the supply of vanity metrics without insight is dwindling. Social listening practices are bedding in across organisations. With increasing stakeholders and expectations, practitioners expect more from their vendors.
Put another way, we’ve got more data, in more places and a growing volume of stakeholders asking for that data to be delivered in the form of actionable intelligence.
The expectation is therefore, in part aided by the uptake of AI in the mainstream, for vendors to develop technologies that lessen the burden on practitioners and reduce the time to get from data to insight.
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