What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I am a Strategic Insights Manager at Google in France. My role involves leveraging cutting-edge technologies to identify emerging trends and translate them into tangible outcomes for brands. I utilize insights tools to discover consumer triggers and pain points, map the consumer journey, and measure brand perception. This approach allows us to anticipate new opportunities, enhance brand relevance, and amplify its visibility.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
With 16 years of experience as a Data Translator at the intersection of marketing strategy, data science, and consumer insights, I have honed my skills through pivotal roles at Google, Twitter, and Publicis. I've adopted a “data empathy” approach to uncover human truths and create culturally relevant narratives that emotionally resonate with audiences, thereby increasing brand favorability and consideration. My journey into social listening began at Publicis, within the strategic planning department, where I started to leverage listening tools and semantic analysis to refine brand positioning for global brands and enhance their impact with real-time marketing strategies.
What has been your biggest achievement?
I built the first data insight hub at Publicis in France from scratch, expanding the team from zero to six members. This team has significantly contributed to new business growth, enhanced brand awareness, and fostered new collaborative practices within the company. By integrating data insights at the beginning of marketing and communication processes, we introduced innovative capabilities, storytelling techniques, cutting-edge tools, and strategic frameworks. This model has been scaled up and adopted as a benchmark across all Publicis Group entities in France, benefiting hundreds of users.
What’s the boldest mistake you’ve made? What did you learn from it?
When I started my career as a junior insights analyst, I wanted to make a dashboard that showed trends from search engines and social media using hybrid metrics. But when I showed it to the team, I used a lot of technical terms, trying to show my knowledge. This made it hard for people from different backgrounds to understand me. This experience taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of clarity and simplicity. I learned that effective communication and the accessibility of information are crucial for fostering a collaborative working environment and ensuring that insights are comprehensible and actionable for all cross-functional teams. This experience served as a turning point, inspiring me to prioritize clear communication over complexity, a principle that has guided my approach ever since.
What would be your dream project to work on?
I am fascinated by projects related to artificial intelligence, especially General AI. The potential of AI to accelerate insight generation, offer new perspectives on consumer behavior and journeys, and create intuitive, organic data visualizations excites me. These tools can help translate consumer insights into more relatable narratives that serve every level of an organization. Artificial intelligence's capacity to streamline processes, enhance storytelling, and deepen our understanding of consumers is not just a technological advancement but a fundamental shift in engaging with customers, making every strategy more impactful. This is why projects leveraging General AI to redefine insights and analytics captivate and inspire me.
Do you think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use social data?
While technology plays a crucial role in collecting and interpreting data for brand outcomes, it's vital to first clearly define the real business problems we aim to solve. The quality and relevance of the questions we pose to our insights team directly influence the insights we derive. It is crucial to articulate what we seek to understand, discover, and validate, including any initial hypotheses we might have. Engaging in a strategic questioning process not only steers the insights team in the right direction but also ensures that the insights uncovered are directly applicable and valuable in solving our specific business problems. This deliberate approach to querying significantly enhances the quality and applicability of the insights obtained, demonstrating that effectively leveraging data insights pivots on formulating the right questions.
Are there areas where you think you should be using social data for but aren’t currently?
There's a significant opportunity to more effectively demonstrate the incremental impact of consumer insights on business outcomes, regardless of the methodologies or data sources employed. It's important to establish a clear link between insights and their value to business and brand visibility. Insights are just the beginning; we must consider their full implications throughout the marketing process, envisioning how they will inform product innovation and marketing narratives. Tracking the business impact of insights is essential to assess the value of our efforts.
What’s your favourite data source to use and why?
Search queries are incredibly insightful as they reveal audience emotions, brand consideration, purchase criteria, seasonality and product preferences across all industries. Given that all segments of audiences use Google search to find answers, but not all engage in posting on social media, search queries offer unparalleled value. Moreover, search queries can uncover topics that web users may not openly express on social media platforms, making them a valuable source of insights. Data is like archaeology, as data translators, we search for hidden pieces to build a story. We need to look where the human stories are. My deep conviction is that we need to be data agnostic and prioritize the outcomes. We need to combine multiple data sources to capture the full picture and approach human truth.
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