What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I work for The Estée Lauder Companies and lead Trends and Foresight as part of our North America Consumer Insights function. I identify consumer trends, unpacking the ‘why’s’ behind them and how they are manifesting in beauty through data points such as market insights and social listening. As a brand-led organization, I work closely with our North America brand teams to support their consumer centric strategies by providing an in-depth lens into their priority beauty consumer segments.
I leverage social listening in many ways, including to keep pulse of trends, measure brand activation impact, identify key themes in the competitive landscape and to integrate the data and insights into our business.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I have a digital media and digital strategy background and have spent most of my career outside of my last four and half years at The Estée Lauder Companies, agency-side.
Social listening has played a role in my career since I began in the advertising industry and is playing a much larger role now than ever before. Working at a small digital agency early on in my career, we leveraged social listening primarily from a reporting perspective to measure impact of our paid and owned media efforts for various clients. As I grew into my next role as a Strategist, I began leveraging social listening in more ways, from crisis management, to identifying whitespace opportunities and to form concepts for earned media activations.
What has been your biggest achievement?
I’m a big believer in striving for small wins that amount to a big impact. Such as, getting a stakeholder onboard, seeing a strategic recommendation you’ve shared with a brand or your client in action and driving performance, or enabling change and mindset shifts internally like incorporating social listening into existing workstreams. This keeps me challenged, engaged, and driven. Chasing small wins also means you can celebrate the achievements every week!
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
When I was working agency-side for a client in the financial sector whose objective was to recruit new millennial consumers, I developed a proposal that sought to tap into micro influencers in niche categories to drive authenticity with their target consumer. It is safe to say the activation was not as successful as I had hoped, and I soon learned that to enable change in such a large organization, taking many small steps can be more effective.
What would be your dream project to work on?
It’s hard to say with certainty what my dream project would be because I love what I do. Beauty is such an interesting and multi-faceted category. Occasions, need states, and concerns that drive trends are always shifting and evolving. I do think that launching a new brand would be an incredible opportunity and challenge to work on – really building the launch plan from the ground up, keeping consumer insights at the heart of the activation strategy to drive relevancy and growth.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
Well, taking a step back like any data or research I would suggest avoiding taking stats and facts at face value, and instead really seeking to understand “why” or “now what?” behind the numbers. The function and capability of social listening is evolving so quickly so brands must figure out how to tap into the data in ways that haven’t been done before to reveal a bigger or more granular picture that supports their strategies and execution.
What’s your favorite data source to use and why?
That’s a tough one! The communities on Reddit are so engaged and passionate – this is my personal favorite platform for unpacking key trends in the beauty category
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