by Advancing Social Media Research at Nestle
Social media research has made a huge impact on how organisations can better understand their stakeholders. Now AI is adding exciting new options to the mix. Frank Gregory, Nestle’s Social Intelligence Lead, will discuss why every organization needs a best in class social intelligence capability at Qual360 NA 2024. We caught up with Frank ahead of the conference.
Qual360: Without giving too much away – what is the core message of your talk and what would you like delegates to remember?
Frank: Social Media Research has advanced significantly over the past couple years. Between visual-based listening and the advancements in AI, what used to be a nice-to-have in your qualitative (and quantitative) toolbox is now a need-to-have for every major organization.
For the ever-increasingly popular visual social channels like TikTok and Instagram Reels, the ability to train social listening tools to recognize logos and objects in videos is crucial to make sure you don’t have blind spots. Plus, while previously everyone in an organization that wanted to conduct social listening had to learn how to navigate the charts, graphs and word-clouds, we’re now seeing AI-generated summaries at the top of dashboards, making for efficient democratization of the takeaways.
Finally, AI is now allowing for a whole new breed of Social Intelligence tools that can predict emerging trends, so we’re no longer just thinking about “what have consumers been saying about X?”….we’re now able to see “what WILL consumers likely be saying about X in the near future?”.
If you haven’t taken another look at these tools recently, you should.
Qual360: Besides discussing social media research and social listening, what motivates you to join the Qual360 NA conference and what are your expectations?
Frank: I’m really looking forward to see how the industry is evolving. Meaning, outside of my space in Social Intelligence, where else are we seeing new innovative methodologies complementing the tried-and-true qualitative methodologies to gain stronger insight at speed?
I’m sure there will be many examples of these innovations from tool vendors, but I’m also hoping to see case studies of how leading organizations are already leveraging these new research innovations.
Qual360: What is the place of qualitative research today, and where do you see the industry heading?
Frank: In my mind, there will always be a need for strong qualitative research in the marketing industry, as it humanizes the numbers in a powerful way. Telling consumer stories through qualitative research brings the insight to life, gives the consumer a name, and is more memorable than a chart or a graph.
Where I see the industry going is the successful weaving of innovation (AI, Social Intelligence, etc) into the qualitative researcher toolbox. There will always be a need for strong insight coming from surveys and focus groups, given their ability to be designed to accurately represent the general population. The opportunity that I see leading researchers doing is leveraging the sometimes messy, unstructured but increasingly-insightful datasets (like social media) to complement and inform those gen-pop methodologies and therefore tell a comprehensive consumer story.
Qual360: What do you consider to be the 3 essential elements of the qualitative research toolkit today?
Frank: For me, it’s memorability, actionability and speed. Qualitative research needs to be able to quickly identify consumer stories that paint a clear picture of consumer wants & needs, in a way that drives the audience to easily understand the action that must be taken to help the consumer.
I always love the idea of putting a consumer story from qualitative research at the beginning of every marketing presentation. In order to do that, the researcher must be able to identify consumer stories quickly (via social listening or other close-to-real-time methodologies like mining customer care calls), while balancing the design of more structured, recurring research reporting that tells the story of the general population in a representative way.
For example, being able to build custom social listening models (using natural language processing) that take you beyond positive/negative/neutral sentiment into brand trust scores or brand loyalty scores can provide you with strong examples in near-real-time for presentations, while also serving as a predictive indicator of a potential fluctuation in an NPS score when the next monthly or quarterly brand tracking survey results come out.
Qual360: Big Qual – How are you tackling the challenge of big data to gain new qualitative insights?
Frank: Being in Social Intelligence, and particularly social listening, I work in big, unstructured datasets every day, distilling insight from millions of social media posts on a topic. But where it gets really interesting is when you feed those datasets into an organization’s knowledge management tool or data lake, so that you can blend multiple datasets together to uncover & visualize a more comprehensive consumer research story.
We’re just getting started with this at my organization, but our goal is to have our research teams be able to query a knowledge management platform like they would ChatGPT, with the platform housing as many recent research reports as possible, along with real-time feeds of social/digital datasets, customer care transcripts, etc. Organizations that can crack this nut will be empowering their research teams with a treasure trove of insight in the future.
Qual360: Apart from work, what should delegates talk to you about at Qual360 NA– do you have any particular personal interests, hobbies or extracurricular activities and engagements?
Frank: I’m a dad of two kids, an 8 year old son and 6 year old daughter, so my days are spent playing in the backyard, playing board games, taking them to sports practices and other activities, etc. I love being a dad, bringing my kids as many opportunities as possible to that they can try, as they grow into their own interests & preferences.
Outside of that, my two loves are sports and music. Put a racket in front of me, no matter what the sport, and I’m in, I’m glued to the TV. Or, tell me about a new band to check out or a concert to go to, and you’ve got me hooked.
Qual360: Thank you Frank, we look forward to hearing more when we see you live at Qual360 NA in Washington D.C.!
Join the qualitative community in Washington D.C on March 13&14 to hear from Frank and leaders from Mars, Novartis, Bose, Expedia, Gallup, Universal, Logitech, Sago, Warner Bros Discovery and many more.
