Explainer: Social Listening – Zack Condry (Echo)

Zack Condry:

I'm looking for the numbers first and foremost, and then contextual intelligence to inform us and give us a clearer picture.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing Partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you are joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. We're doing a deep dive into the topic of social listening on this episode. For those of us working in the public affairs and political space, we want to know what's being said about our candidates, policy issues, clients, and more. But the challenge is there's so much data and so much noise that it's hard to separate what matters, and that's where social listening comes in. To help us understand the world of social listening, we're joined by Zach Condre, founder of Echo data focused digital corporate communications firm that helps companies mitigate risk and dampen complex issues affecting their reputation. Zach started his career in the political campaign world before transitioning to public affairs and corporate communications. Zach, social listening has become a sort of buzzword, so let's begin by defining what it is and what it isn't. So what's your two minute pitch on explaining social listening?

Zack Condry:

Yeah, so the best digital listening or digital monitoring uses publicly available mentions on Twitter, Reddit forums, q and a platforms seen at Weebo, but also broadcast news and, you know, Lexus Nexus inputs. And ultimately, you know, I mean all of these things, they're on digital but they're not exclusively social. I mean, used to this type of listening used to be exclusively social, but there are several platforms out there that have kind of combined the traditional and the, and the social and really made it about digital listening, which is wonderful. But ultimately, kind of what we're looking for when we're, you know, looking at all these digital mentions is volume, velocity, and sentiment, and how those three kind of interplay. And then when we look at those three kind of foundational elements, we add a fourth in, which is influence, you know, the individual talking or the organization talking and influencing conversation. How credible are they? Do they hold authority within the, the matter that we're researching? All of those four things kind of working together really help us understand how a client or issue or trade association is being perceived within the digital environment.

Eric Wilson:

So it, it is more than it, it is sort of, it's media listening, not just just social. I think maybe user generated content is probably a more, more encompassing term. And so you mentioned some of the, the, the platforms and data sources that go into social listening or digital listening, monitoring. So what, what are those that, that, that get incorporated into these, these, these products?

Zack Condry:

Well, it all depends. I mean, you get what you pay for <laugh> the <laugh>, there's some that you know, will get you Twitter. There's also media monitoring, which, you know, you can use do like a Cision, for instance, a pretty cheap media monitoring. But, you know, once you start,

Eric Wilson:

So that, when, when you say media monitoring, that's broadcast cable tv, print, newspapers, things like that.

Zack Condry:

Yeah, and I mean, even, even then you can get 'em hacked up. You know, there's a separate broadcast listening tool. There's a separate, you know, kind of news publication only listening tool. You know, and, and, and I've seen people do this before, but it, it's really cumbersome and can spit out kind of messed up data. People kind of cobble together their own listening solution. If you have the, the, the resources, my recommendation is to kind of go to one of these premier type platforms and that cobbles it all together, uses AI to help build out sentiment, and then spits out really pretty reports or at least kind of graphs, some data visualization. It really helps kind of contextualize the environment when you've got a robust platform.

Eric Wilson:

Got it. So we've got sort of your, let's say, legacy media that that is going into to some of these platforms Twitter. What are, what are some other sources that are typically included under the umbrella of social listening?

Zack Condry:

Reddit? we've seen Reddit really come up in terms of, it was always kind of a popular platform, but from a news discussion, news engagement it's really starting to come up. People on Reddit like to talk about companies. They like to talk about how they feel about companies. And that is getting more and more prevalent. So Reddit is, is a big one, Cora, or, you know, various forums. Those are quite pop popular on, on the social listening platforms. And then it all depends on kind of what it, it depends on what the listening platforms goal is, right? Are they focused on crisis? So they focused on brand engagement? Then it kind of gets a little specific of, okay, so you're picking a platform based on the type of work that you're doing, what has been included, right? So for instance, I use one called Signal use several of them, but the one I currently use is Signal. I like them a lot. And they try to be as robust as possible. So they include Cita Webo, for instance or vk,

Eric Wilson:

Which is another one, which for our listeners are, are popular social platforms in China and Russia, respectively.

Zack Condry:

Yeah. Which are typically pretty walled gardens. But with the right keywords and the appropriate client can get some really good actionable intelligence.

Eric Wilson:

So you know, I think Reddit is definitely one that, that I, I think has shot onto a lot of people's radars, post Wall Street bets, when you saw GameStop, A M C, the sort of meme stocks. It, it really is interesting. You can go into the rabbit holes, particularly these gig economy companies. So I'm thinking about like DoorDash it's retail, big retail. They have really active subreddits where people are, are in there complaining about things. So again, if you're not, if you're not keeping an eye on that and you're one of, you know, these, these broader brands, it, it's something Twitter was another interesting one that I, I I, I think it's worth, worth discussing because we're looking at a huge increase in the cost of, of the Twitter api that I think is gonna make it cost prohibitive to a lot of, of platforms. Unclear how that affects some of these bigger media monitoring sources. But that certainly may impact platform's ability to, to, to plug into Twitter, share with us what, what, what we would consider social media, but that can't be monitored from, from typical social listening tools.

Zack Condry:

Yeah. Well, let me, let me tackle Reddit and Twitter real quick. Yeah, yeah. Cause it's kinda the top of mind. So Reddit, Reddit is really good for b2c. At least if you're, if you're B2C or, or have a kind of a niche type issue that generates loyalty or disloyalty think car manufacturers or a television network like an HBO or something. Anything that can garner loyalty from a consumer standpoint, there's probably a subreddit about it.

Eric Wilson:

<Laugh>

Zack Condry:

You know, and if a client has a really difficult issue, you'll see that subreddit see the, the popularity kick up, and it's really interesting to kind of follow users that engage and who who, who starts the most threads and, and all of that. It's, it's really interesting to sit and watch and incredibly informative, particularly for these kind of B2C companies. Now, if there's a niche B2B or you know, some obscure manufacturer of whatever, there's probably not Reddit conversation directly or a subreddit, you know, directly focus on that company organization. But you're probably gonna get it elsewhere of in say it's an environmental issue. There's, I mean, there's probably hundreds of environmental subres that will probably be discussing your, your client. And then on, on Twitter, I totally agree with you on the api. One way that individuals can kind of understand the Twitter environment, and it's, it's kind of a horse and buggy way to do it, but it is pretty good, is Twitter advanced search. Not a lot of people kind of readily know it exists. It's kinda hard to find Google. It's and it's kind of clunky and it's definitely reactive. You gotta, you gotta stay on it. But if you are interested in understanding kind of a Twitter snapshot of what's going on at that moment in time, Twitter advanced search is pretty handy.

Eric Wilson:

Okay. So, so we've got a lot of public data sources, but then there are, there's some, you know, obvious ones that we can't get into, like, like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, right? Where those, those are private, you can't monitor them. But then, you know, one, one that I get asked a lot about is Facebook, right? Facebook is sort of notoriously difficult for monitoring conversation and a lot of the privacy set settings. So what are the, I don't know, what are the blind spots that people need to be aware

Zack Condry:

Of? Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn are the top sort of big three that are quite difficult to monitor for from a, from a publicly available post standpoint. My recommendation would be if you're on the trade association side or a client side, go in and look within the platform within kind of your own walled garden to understand engagement, how individuals are talking about you, who are the big influencers. But it's quite difficult to look outside those castle walls on those platforms. Now there's search functionality, but we don't know who's hidden behind some privacy filters or, or, or what have you. And, and we don't frankly know how any of those platforms, how their search functionality works with the algorithm. Quite difficult. The one though that is <laugh>, the need to monitor might go away very quickly. Tiktok is incredibly difficult to monitor for. There are some

Eric Wilson:

And, and is that just because they don't provide access or it's so new?

Zack Condry:

Yeah, yeah. They used to not provide access. They're getting a lot better at it. That's all relative when you're talking about TikTok, right? But the main issue that I found, there's a few kind of standalone TikTok monitoring solutions that are pretty good, and then some of the kind of larger scale listening solutions try to incorporate TikTok. But the problem is the content type and the scale can be really difficult for these platforms to understand and digest, right? I

Eric Wilson:

Mean, like, so if you're dealing with video, I mean, you, you've gotta transcribe it, you've gotta, you don't know what's in the video, that kinda thing.

Zack Condry:

Yeah. Like, it's only based on hashtags. And, you know, maybe titles of the video, because let me step back. All of this listening is based off of keywords,

Eric Wilson:

Right?

Zack Condry:

It's based off of, you know, company x plus data breach plus, you know whatever whatever you wanna understand. It's a combination of, of keywords

Eric Wilson:

And the users famously don't a adhere to like brand standards and, and talking about things. That's right. Exactly. The, the preferred way that public affairs pros do.

Zack Condry:

Yeah. And, and particularly TikTok users, they just throw these, you know, disposable videos up with a few hashtags and maybe some silly title and, and then there you go. So that is quite difficult. But then also the scale, I mean the, these, some of these videos get hundreds and thousands, millions of views before you even blink <laugh>. And, and these, you know, these social listening platforms are used to dealing with that kind of steady stream of tweets or Reddit posts or you know, a New York Times article kind of spiking and then chilling out. That's not necessarily the case with TikTok. And if it is the case, it's a lot heavier and a lot hotter.

Eric Wilson:

I mean, I think

Zack Condry:

Combine all that stuff is difficult.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. What one, one thing that I find really interesting is, is just the organic cross promotion across these platforms. Like I, I see so many TikTok videos on Reddit and, and Twitter, right? That, that if something is actually popular, it's gonna cross over. So you may get some of that, but to your point, you know, with the, the way the TikTok recommendation algorithm works, it's just like, it, it can be like wildfire sometimes. So now that we've got a, a good handle on, on what the, the data sources are, how do you determine the key metrics to track in a social listening project?

Zack Condry:

Yeah, I mean, we're only really talking about, or at least we only have, you know, at the start of this we've only talked about listening, listening does nothing <laugh>. It's really understanding the metrics, providing context and reporting. It all depends the key, what the key metrics depend on what the client wants to do. Are we monitoring for a story to hit, you know, maybe there's a New York Times story or political story that we know is getting written and we're really watching hard for it. And then once it hits, we wanna know when it hits and catch it as early as possible. And then understand the reach and resonance amongst kind of our key audiences. Do we want to know how public officials engage on an issue? Do we seek to pass legislation? Do are we running a legitimate public affairs campaign? I mean, there's literally dozens of different scenarios, and it's based off of those scenarios and then what the client wants, you know, who they wanna reach and how they wanna get it accomplished. And then we, so

Eric Wilson:

Is it views or key accounts? What are, like, what are the, the options that that might be out there for some,

Zack Condry:

I'm really looking for kind of weight on the conversation.

Eric Wilson:

Got it.

Zack Condry:

So yeah, going back to volume, velocity sentiment, I, to me, velocity is the biggest, but I work a lot in kind of these,

Eric Wilson:

So velocity is like, like how quickly something spreads, right? Correct.

Zack Condry:

Correct. Yeah. So, you know, maybe it's a big volume, but it's slow or it's really thin volume, but it moves quickly. I, all of those kind of dictate how we monitor what key metrics we focus on. But I'm particularly looking for weight, so velocity and then influence.

Eric Wilson:

My big rule data and, and metrics and reporting is I never wanna see a number by itself. It, it needs to be a comparison to something else. Cuz other, I mean, a hundred a hundred degrees could be warm <laugh>, it could be cooler. I mean, I just need to know what, what you're talking about differences. So what are the trends that you look for in tracking these metrics?

Zack Condry:

Yeah, I mean, to your point, I had a, I had a, I'm not taking credit for this. I had a boss tell me one time his saying was, data without context is just counting. And and I completely agree with that. I mean, that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for, I'm looking for the numbers first and foremost. And then contextual intelligence to kind of inform us and give us a, a, a clearer picture. A lot of times what I'll do, particularly when I start with a client, is I will I'll to kind of what what I call a landscape snapshot of, okay, they care about this, this issue. What does that issue look like in the last two years? Who's engaged? How heavy is the conversation been? What have the peaks and valleys looked like? And then I will pull something kind of similar. I've done the Super Bowl before, I've done, you know, celebrity mishaps, whatever, to show them, okay, you know, this thing that's happening in the news, it is 400 x you know, what you've gone through. And even in the past two years to show them like, okay, so here's the real story on what we're watching and here's how we're gonna watch it to kinda set the stage.

Eric Wilson:

There used to be this metric the Kardashian, right? Which is like how much <laugh> attention Kim Kardashian gets in a, in a single day. And, and you, you pick any, I mean, you pick anything, again, this is showing my age, but you know, you go back 10 years and, and there was nothing that got more attention than Kim Kardashian on a given day, right? I don't know what that, that metric is, is nowadays, but that, that is helpful to put in perspective of, yeah, it may seem like it's the end of the world to you, it's the center of your universe, but it barely a blip in, in sort of popular culture. You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. I'm speaking with Zach Condre, founder of Echo about social listening, digital monitoring. Zach, when I'm working on a project and there's discussion about social listening, or I'm pitched on social listening software, my question is always the same one that you mentioned. But what happens after you listen? Are there actionable insights? Is the organization willing and able to respond to what it hears? So how does a client effectively use that information that that insight that they get from social listening?

Zack Condry:

This is gonna sound trivial, but more than half of it depends on the presentation. Are you presenting the

Eric Wilson:

Presentation of, of the data,

Zack Condry:

Correct. Either the social listening platform, are they presenting it in a aesthetically appealing way, in a way that can be easily digestible by non communicators? And then as a communications practitioner, you know, like somebody like me, am I taking it and I, and am I digesting it contextually for the client and giving them proper recommendations based on the data? Or I might just throw in a bunch of graphs and numbers on a page that makes all the difference in the world, whether they listen or not. I know that's silly, but like you hand, you know, some of these reports that I put out, I put out one on on Fridays for a client that's like, it's like between 20 and 30 pages, and the client's not gonna read that. And I understand that some of the client reads that, but I know the CEO doesn't. So we create an executive summary, a one page kind of tear off thing of like, okay, all you gotta do is look at this one thing, look at this one page. And that really helps us drive decision making because these tools will give you untold amount of data and graphs, God knows what else. And it's really accompanied upon us to provide digestible, actionable intelligence.

Eric Wilson:

I I don't think that that's trivial at all. I think that's a really important point, and I wanna just dwell on it for a minute, which is, you know, we have so much data, especially when you're talking about digital marketing or digital media. We are not lacking for data. We are lacking for insights. And you know, it's funny, you know, every piece of software you use today has a dashboard. And, and we've forgotten what dashboards really are. They came from your car and there there were like five things on there that you need to keep track of how fast you're going, your RPMs, how much gas you have, which direction you're going. I mean there, there are four or five pieces of data that you need to see very quickly on your dashboard. If your dashboard looked like half of the dashboards we see in software, you would either be parked on the side of the road or running into a tree, right? And, and so I think you're exactly right. Having, having a view, having an editorial perspective on the data and and how it's reported is, is essential if you, if you want people to act on it.

Zack Condry:

Yeah. And that's why I am really concerned about the prevalence of ai. I do not want people to rest on their laurels and just have AI spit stuff out. It takes client knowledge. I mean, some real true trench work to provide those insights to clients.

Eric Wilson:

So speaking of artificial intelligence, one of the things that's been a challenge in social listing is, is sentiment analysis. So not only knowing the, the volume of keywords the most active platforms, but are the comments positive, negative, and different sarcasm? How have we seen advancements in artificial intelligence AI specifically with these large language models like we're seeing with chat G P t g P T four now, how have those improved sentiment analysis in in social listening?

Zack Condry:

I haven't really seen it improve. I mean, it's improved kind of gradually over time. One thing that I, again, you know, I kinda work on these critical type issues and, and one thing I've seen, yes, sarcasm is often criticized aspect of AI sentiment, but it's also like I, I worked for a big hospital system and we would do digital monitoring for, for the big hospital system and their competitors and kinda the US hospital landscape, it's primarily negative. Both kinda a, you know, cause the hospital system and people are pretty critical, but also you're talking about death and cancer and sickness and illness and nurses strikes and all this stuff. It's just, it's negative. And AI cinnamon is not great for stuff like that. It doesn't really provide kind of that under the hood level of cinnamon analysis that you really need for these negative leaning clients. Right. Like

Eric Wilson:

If you're, if your benchmark is is zero yeah, like in terms of sentiment Yeah,

Zack Condry:

<Laugh>, yeah. So like that's actually where I've found the AI's lack AI sentiment analysis lacking recently is like, aren't on these issues that are pre negative <laugh>. Right. Okay, well, analysis doesn't even ma doesn't even matter. And when you dig into it, it's all messed up, you know? Cause somebody could be posting about something good happening with someone's cancer, you know, cancer cure or whatever. And I, and I've seen it happen, AI classifi that as negative

Eric Wilson:

Because cancer is involved <laugh>.

Zack Condry:

Yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. So that's, it's tough with those types of issues. I think it'd probably be less so with trade associations and kind of more neutral issues. And I, I, and I definitely use it, but that's, that's definitely,

Eric Wilson:

It has its limitations

Zack Condry:

I've seen recently, for sure.

Eric Wilson:

So Zach, you alluded to the use case through social listing. You know, if you're a brand consumer packaged good or service the, the b2c like an airline for example, it's pretty obvious, but how does a, a public affairs client, like a trade association benefit from, from social listening,

Zack Condry:

Unless you're kind of one of the top 20 trade associations, nobody cares about the organization, they care about the issue,

Eric Wilson:

Right?

Zack Condry:

So I think really solid, consistent issue monitoring can be so helpful. Public affairs, there's the same sort of thing, but from a government relations standpoint, from a lobbying perspective, you know, that's half of what lobbyists do is they say, oh, well I talked to this subcommittee member and he thinks that X, Y, Z, which is incredibly valuable, but there's a whole other aspect that trade associations aren't paying attention to. And that's the digital environment of like, how are people actually talking about these issues? You know?

Eric Wilson:

Yeah. What are, what are that, what is that congressman's input? Yeah,

Zack Condry:

<Laugh>. That's right. I mean, for instance, the leading pfas reporter pfas is a, you know, those forever chemicals and stuff. The leading pfas reporter is a guy that contr contracts, he's like a freelancer with the Guardian UK based publication, and he's a food critic for like a Detroit, Michigan independent newspaper. And so if you're a plastics company, if you're, you know, 3m not a client, but they recently had some PPAs issues. If you're 3m, you care a lot about what this guy at The Guardian has to say. Not necessarily, oh, we're worried about the New York Times of Washington Post and social data gets us that,

Eric Wilson:

Right? So if you were, if you were just monitoring, you know, let's just say your top 10 newspapers, you're gonna miss out on a, a key driver that, that then spills over into social conversation

Zack Condry:

And in influences you know, public officials heavily. And, and you can see it in the data as well of like, oh, okay, so X number of members follow this guy on, on Twitter. And with that kind of background landscape you can see, oh, okay, so whenever he writes a piece on x, y, Z, two weeks later we have a hearing or

Eric Wilson:

<Laugh>. Yeah. Okay. So Zach, what's, what's something that a listener to this podcast can do to get started in social listening? Maybe dip a toe into the water without a big commitment of time or money, because these platforms, as you mentioned, are, are expensive take a lot of time to, to learn and set up. You mentioned Twitter, advanced search. Are there some other ways that, that people can start to see the power of, of social listening?

Zack Condry:

And maybe this is silly, but I think just look at the analytics and the platforms you own. Look at Facebook, Instagram, Google Analytics, anything you can kind of get your hands on to understand how your audiences are engaging with you. How then do you refine what you put out? Who is engaging with the content? Is it your target audience? How do you align the content that you put out with your goals to reach them? I, I mean, I would say look inward first and foremost, and understand the interplay of all of that data. I mean, that's kind of like social media marketing 1 0 1, right? Yeah. I mean,

Eric Wilson:

That's a really good point. And it, it, it's so, so obvious, but we need to be reminded of it, right? So we don't, don't go out and and pay for, for more data if you're already ignoring the data that you've got.

Zack Condry:

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. And then for you know, we talk about publicly available social listening. Twitter's advanced search function is really good. And there's a number of kind of low cost social monitoring platforms that you can cobble together and use you know, a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month type of deal to fit your, your needs. I mean, there's one that I actually particularly like for TikTok called Brand 24. It's not incredibly robust, but it kind of gets me exactly what I need for a certain client and and it's great. So <laugh>, I would say, you know, use the search functionality as best as possible. The Reddit search functionality is a disaster <laugh>. So Paul is in advance if you go down that rabbit hole. But then also Google, you know, social listening or, or kind of what you want to get accomplished and, and wade through those waters a little bit cuz you know, you could cobble together a, a, a decent solution for a few few hundred bucks a month now, you know, if you wanted something big and robust, that's a whole other conversation.

But if you wanna dip your toes in yeah, there's some low cost options for sure.

Eric Wilson:

Well, my thanks to Zach Condre for a great conversation on this episode. You can learn more about his work and his firm Echo at the link in our show notes. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague and bonus you look smart in the process as well. Remember to subscribe to The Business of Politics Show wherever you get your podcasts, so you'll never miss an episode. You can also sign up for email updates and see past episodes at our website, business of politics podcast.com. With that, I'll say thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.

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