What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I’m the Senior Manager of Social Intelligence and Operations. I leverage social listening in nearly every facet of my day-to-day job. My role covers all social listening deliverables including monitoring, reporting, reputation management, trend tracking, category research, and more. I work cross-functionally to support a variety of teams like Brand, Influencer, PR, Product Innovation, and Customer Care to deliver actionable insights to help inform decision-making.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
My background is in full-stack marketing with an emphasis on social media. Before Keurig Dr Pepper, I worked for a few different tech startups where I held roles across media, user acquisition/retention, content, and growth. I gravitated towards social media and developed my skill set both from a content and analytics perspective which led me to social listening as a practice. Since arriving at KDP in 2019, I’ve focused primarily on social listening as my full-time role working to build and evolve the program to where it is today.
What has been your biggest achievement?
I had to build our social listening program essentially from scratch. In doing this, I was challenged with establishing a rapport with a variety of stakeholders and demonstrating the value social intelligence provides. I’m extremely proud of the progress we’ve made and the incremental value realized by the organization year after year. Part of my team’s scope includes recurring brand-specific social listening reports. We now have reports with 100+ recipients on their respective distribution lists which is a testament to our team’s dedication and the organization’s growing investment in our program.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
As part of building a social intelligence program, you’re constantly looking for ways to create efficiencies, especially when bandwidth and headcount are limited. I found myself trying to templatize nearly everything we were doing, which in hindsight was a mistake. Outputs of social listening can vary drastically and so the “one size fits all” approach for the work can negatively impact the quality of work. We were saying yes to everything without truly considering the variance of a project’s requirements and what an ideal deliverable would look like. As a result, we’ve been more selective with the projects that we take on and how they come to life. I want to be able to emphasize the storytelling and actionability of our work so we’ve had to evolve how we approach our projects and what the final output looks like.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I’m fortunate enough to have had the ability to work on an array of projects that have helped to support nearly every function of the organization. I’ve supported a few projects already, but I find sports fandom on social media to be particularly fascinating. There’s such a profound passion, energy, and truly authentic way that sports fans engage and interact on social media. As a diehard sports fan myself, I’d love to dive even deeper into this cohort for a specific team or league. The way sports fans talk on social media is unique and a project where I could dissect this a bit would certainly be interesting.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
I strongly believe that social data can provide tremendous value to any organization. That being said, it's important to be mindful of not only what you are sharing, but how you are sharing it. I’ve always found it to be a challenge to effectively communicate some of the nuisances and limitations that come with social data. I’ve put a lot of effort into standardizing how we share data to address knowledge gaps and being transparent around things like sentiment, API restrictions, and general limitations.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
We’ve really made an effort to leverage social data for as many use cases as possible, but there’s still plenty of opportunity for growth. I’d like to be more intentional with the work we do around trend detection and analysis. We’ve made strides to improve this capability internally through the expansion of our tech stack and focusing our internal collaboration efforts with the relevant teams. However, this is an area in which we can more work to more strategically utilize social data at scale.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Reddit is an incredible data source if you leverage it the right way. I always hear social listening referred to as the “world’s biggest focus group”, Reddit is a prime example of this. Especially when it comes to product innovation, the breadth and depth of subreddits unlock unique customer feedback that feels far more organic than reviews. If you want unfiltered opinions about your brand/product Reddit is a great place to explore.
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