[Podcast] Beyond the Text Feed: Chelsie Hall on Redefining Social Listening for the TikTok Era

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Podcast Transcript

Jackie Cuyvers:
Welcome to the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast, where we showcase the incredible work of women working in the field of social intelligence. My name is Jackie Kivers, and I’ll be your host for this journey. In this podcast, we’ll be speaking with women from enterprise, agencies, and academia who are leading the charge in the world of social listening and insights. Together, we’ll be exploring their careers and the challenges they’ve faced and overcome and the innovative solutions they’ve developed. Our goal is to provide valuable insights and advice to our listeners who are passionate about this field and committed to advancing their careers. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, you’ll find inspiration and guidance in these conversations. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from the women who are shaping the future of social intelligence. Let’s get started.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Can you introduce yourself, your name, title, and tell us a little bit about yourself and ViralMoment?

Chelsie Hall:
Hey Jackie, thank you so much for having me. I’m Chelsie Hall, the founder and CEO of ViralMoment and. And ViralMoment is a video first social intelligence company. We realized social media had changed, but the tools to understand it and measure it had not. So ViralMoment is really built around.

Jackie Cuyvers:
That sounds great. I know that you and I have spoken a little bit about your background and history, but it would be great if you could share a little bit. Your career path is so fascinating. From founding ViralMoment to your earlier work in strategy and analytics. What sparked your interest in social intelligence and how did your journey lead to creating a video first listening tool?

Chelsie Hall:
I love this question because I’ve had so much fun working different roles in the social intelligence industry. I’ve always been obsessed with culture and just how systems and culture move and how people behave and behavioral economics piece of it. So that led me for a time in my career, I was working with a think tank as a freelancer for the Department of Defense and Department of State and I basically there was like a central social listening model and we were helping work with them across social listening use cases. So my whole job, I didn’t actually do the analytics work. I was in charge of finding the right tools to work with different use cases. So like the CIA would come and they would say, hey, what we need to understand the price of bread in Afghanistan? Or there’d be a use case from the FBI and they’d be like, we need to know what people in the the country of Georgia think about the Pfizer vaccine. So it was such a fun time where I was just going through all of the amazing technologies and tools that were available to understand people and understand the world. But during this time, I was like, wait a minute, every tool is focused on text and the world is changing and the Internet is changing and the way that we interact with each other on the Internet is changing. But that tooling just wasn’t keeping up. Everything still continued to be focused on like text feeds that you think about, like the old days of Twitter. It was like a text feed with your network that you could connect with. That’s not what social media is at all anymore. Now we’ve got these algorithm based video feeds where, you know, what I see when I look at a topic is different from what you see, Jackie. And that’s different from what anyone in our audience would hear or see. So I was like, we really need better, efficient tooling that can understand the new way that people communicate. And that’s, that’s really what led to ViralMoment. It was my own frustration that there was nothing in the field that even came close to addressing the way people really worked. And that’s how ViralMoment was born.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Okay, so it sounds like, you know, you spotted a need in the industry, a real gap, and you’re clearly, you know, a bold innovator in this space of video insights. What, what inspired you to not just kind of invest maybe in tools that, that were already kind of getting built in this area, but really building your own platform. Was there a specific moment or insight that made you realize that, you know, not just was there a need, but you were the right person to lead the charge?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Honestly, I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I think you’re the same, Jackie. Before starting ViralMoment, I’d started several other companies that were, you know, design thinking groups and I. So this isn’t the first time I’ve ever started a company. I have a master’s degree in innovation and developing and building products. So it’s something I’m very, I understand how to, how to make things and build things and bring things to market. So when I started looking at what was available in the company’s structure of like, you know, who could, who’s going to be tackling this? Just every other company and group. I didn’t like their mindset. It was so rooted in the way things had been, not the way things, how things were and how the way things were going. And that bothered me. I was like, you know what, I really do think I could do this. I knew it was a huge hard challenge though, and that I couldn’t do it by myself. So that’s where I’m so fortunate to have met my co founder, Shaida. She has two master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon in machine learning, and she used to work for NASA piloting drones with computer vision. So we went to the same grad school.I’d met her and I was like, you know what? Someone like Shayda could actually build what I see. And, you know, I had kind of a harebrained way I approached Shayda and I was like, what if you could do this and this? You put two together tech like this. I’m sure she laughed at me, but she was like, you know what? The world does need this, and I think I can do it. So we put our heads together and here we are.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Well, it sounds like, you know, you had the right person in mind working with your co founder, Shayda. How do you approach collaboration with other stakeholders, whether they’re clients, investors, or partners? You know, to ensure that your product not just meets emerging needs, but is kind of showcasing your vision?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, that’s such an important question. Because what we’re building is for people to use, right? We’re building a tool that we want social listening leaders to be able to be successful with. Mike, My goal is to make everyone who uses our tools, like, easier and to give them superpowers to see more. So we do a ton of work. I think we, we maybe get pain because we say stuff is in beta for maybe way too long and all the time. But to me, when it’s because we’re, we release something small really intentionally and we work very closely with people who work it and try it to understand, hey, what do you like? What do you not like? Like what? What of this tool helps you to achieve your goal? So I think I continue to try to push everyone at ViralMoment, the whole entire team to just be obsessed with what do social listening leaders really need to excel. And that’s how we’ve made a name for ourselves in the industry, because we’re building for the problems that people have, and that’s at the forefront. Every morning I wake up and I’m like, okay, how am I going to make someone’s life easier today?

Jackie Cuyvers:
So in a world where content moves fast, especially in video, with TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, how do you balance the demand for real time video insights that your users are telling you about with the need for deeper, more strategic interpretation?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, man. Another great question. There’s something beautiful about the balance between speed and depth. That technology can tackle. Because, you know, as a human, if you were going to go try to watch all of the videos about New York, and you’re doing a project about New York TikTok, and you wanted to understand what was out there, you would have to watch a ton of videos, it would take you a bunch of time, and then you would have to do the deep thinking to, to get to deep insights. So I see my job as enabling a brilliant human to have as much of the information they can have as quickly as possible so that they can do, you know, the. The deep thinking of drawing out insights from the data. So I would say balancing speed versus depth, it’s really technology can power both so that a brilliant person can get into their zone of genius and understand what’s happening in the world. That’s my approach and thought about it. I think a stat I heard last month was currently there’s something like 67 years of video uploaded to TikTok on a daily basis. I mean, it could have even increased since then, who knows? But I mean, just the scale of that is astronomical. Right. And then couple that with algorithm fog, where the algorithm is only going to show you something that’s very different from what I see. There’s no way that a human can understand what consumers are really saying on social.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Can you share perhaps a recent project or client use case that highlights the value of this video first, social listening and what you might have learned from that experience?

Chelsie Hall:
Yes, I’m trying to think of a really fun one. We’ve got a case study coming out with some of the fun work that we’ve done with Warner Brothers recently. So we’ve talked a lot about our work on the Barbie movie campaign. That was some really, really fun work. But there’s a movie trailer that we just worked on where we were really able to assess and understand globally what do people think about this movie based on what they were saying inside the video. So they weren’t using hashtags and captions to convey how they felt they were going on and on. Having reaction videos to this new trailer that had come out. Our tool was able to actually watch all of those, understand the reactions in depth. And that’s just kind of, you got to think about video content and just user behavior on social. Just, you know, any, anyone off the street who’s using social, all of the richness of how they feel, what they believe, what they think is happening inside the video. So it’s particular, particularly true with these reaction videos that we track a ton of. It’s you know, there’s two things happening on screen. One is like the, the movie trailer and the other is someone’s reaction to the movie trailer. There’s no way that if you’re just looking at the captions and like measuring some hashtags, you can understand any of that. But when we use our AI to read the video and understand all of that, you know, you think of how much information that is. It’s heavy. But you can start to do that at scale and watch all of the reaction videos about a given, you know, from a certain trailer and really quickly have a deep understanding of what do people think, what’s the reaction in the market. That to me is so fun.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you mentioned that there’s a lot going on in the videos that it’s, there’s so much content and so much meaning that’s happening in the video themselves. But videos are, you know, such a visual and often culturally specific medium. How do you and your team approach cross market or multilingual social video content or when kind of doing this analysis at scale?

Chelsie Hall:
Such a good question, Jackie. I think one of the. So we are a global tool. We can provide information and data about what’s happening in video from over like I think it’s 80 languages that our tool can capture. That being said, we can’t translate with the nuance from market to market what’s going on. And that’s where using and partnering with expert team members or local team members is so important. So you know, we, we recently did a project with a large CPG company and they were looking at what do people think about Ramadan in the Middle east and what were they eating during Ramadan? And you know, a user from the US could look at our data and see like the keywords and understand some basic things. But there was so much nuance in that conversation. So, so the real powerful insights didn’t come till someone who was local who understood that nuance approached our data set and could really, really tease it out. So you know, back to like the power of convosphere. You need people who understand that to, to look at the data.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Yep, absolutely. Language and cultural, cultural context that provide nuance are so important. Can you think of an example or a time when you had to perhaps rethink your methodology due to differences in visual culture, langu platform norms in another region?

Chelsie Hall:
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I think, I feel like we do it almost every time we approach, you know, global projects. The methodology is important. One thing actually that happens a lot is that we really need to think about our exclusions because a word that means something in one culture will mean something else. And especially because we do audio transcriptions, text on screen and captions, we’re hearing a lot of sounds and language that you know, might not even be relevant. So when you do video first listening, it is so important to be able to have a really clear view of like what actually am I trying to see so that you can tease out the things that, that aren’t relevant. We were just looking at people who are riding motorcycles in Singapore and like their hair because they were wearing helmets and there was a lot of pollution in the air. And so this client was really interested in like, well, what is the conversation around hair? Because of all of that. It was a large beauty brand and they were like, you know what our tool was capturing so much information about like motorcycles and people and pollution. There’s just so much out there. And it was really a bigger challenge than I expected to go in and actually find only videos that were relevant to this very, very specific conversation. And we actually had to bring in someone who lived in that area to help us understand like what were the right language, what was the slang people used when they talked about motorcycles. What words really like conveyed frustration versus just like annoyance. So there was a huge exclusion activity we had to do to really hone in the data set to get it right. That was hard.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you’ve already mentioned needing to use exclusions per market and market specific inclusion exclusions or potentially inclusions, and working with native speaking analysts who not just understand the language but the cultural context. Do you have any other recommendations on how to do this type of, you know, research that is still, you know, market specific but potentially remaining relevant across multiple markets and maybe a multi market project where video trends are evolving so differently across different markets and regions.

Chelsie Hall:
One of my favorite things about social video is that it brings the world together in a really beautiful way. So while we do see lots of market specific trends and there is the effort of trying to understand what’s happening only in my market, we actually see a tremendous amount of crossover between markets, reach across markets when someone hops on social video. And because it’s an algorithm based feed, you’ll often see amazing things from around the world showing up in your own feed as well as your own backyard. One fun example is this morning what we’re, we’re seeing going viral right now. An Indonesian boat racing trend. There’s someone sits at the front of the boat during these boat races and kind of dances to cheer people on and to get the, to get the rowers rowing in sync, that is translating around the globe. People are reenacting that dance and there’s so much joy and fun in it. So as much as it is an effort of segmenting marketing markets, there’s also the effort of understanding what is the market crossover, how are things bleeding around the globe? And social video, you know, doesn’t have geopolitical boundaries. It’s a really, really beautiful way that we see people coming together. So I love that, that it’s not just kind of, you know, market specific or as you say, there aren’t necessarily boundaries or walls in between the video or trends that are kind of circumnavigating the globe.

Jackie Cuyvers:
How do you see video based social listening connecting not just countries or markets, but with other business functions beyond, you know, say market research like customer experience or strategy or new product innovation or development?

Chelsie Hall:
You know, video social listening is all about just deeply understanding the customer. What do my customers care about? What do they want? How can I meet them where they are and increase the service area of my business yet when it comes to just being more connected with consumers. So this is a really cool cause. It’s actually a huge silo buster in these big organizations because, you know, whether it’s customer experience or creative strategy or product development, it’s all about just what do people want, you know, and how can we make people happy and how can we be present to them. So it’s absolutely a connector because all of these groups at the end of the day just want to understand consumers and that’s what we’re doing. So that same information can go across a wide, big organization to make everyone more consumer centric.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So thinking about how these brands want to be more consumer centric, what ways do you see video social intelligence helping them spot emerging trends early or even shaping or leading them?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, so when you are really, really tuned in to your consumers and the communities that they’re a part of, you just, you begin to, you’re a part of that community, you understand where, where people going. So the art of, you know, being a part of a trend or participating in a trend, it really just is the art of understanding your consumers and being where they are. And what social video listening is doing at the end of the day is just highlighting, hey, this is what people think. This is what people are into right now. This is what people care about. So we increase the speed that a big company can, can see and understand people at. We increase their ability to just be a bigger part of their Consumers lives.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So for brands trying to understand that audience behavior through video, what kinds of patterns or signals or other metrics do you find most valuable?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, I would say I’ll just pick one metric that I’m loving lately for this. We’ve recently released Chatter Score and we’re really looking at kind of like the buzziness of a topic or a video or a thing. You know, how. How chattable is this? How much are people really engaged with a given topic? We do comment analysis, we do video analysis. So we’re kind of like looking at everything together and looking at how, what’s the rate of growth of a conversation? And, and that metric I’ve found to be incredibly valuable because brands get to understand it’s like a heat map for the conversation. What do people really care about right now? And you know, also, you could, you could look at Chatter Score, say, do people still care about this thing is, I, I have a perception that it’s hot. Let’s put in some data and really understand if that’s the case. So Chatter Score has been, it’s a newer thing that we’ve, we’ve released this year that has been tremendously helpful for brands to really understand what’s big now.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Just out of curiosity, does it show not just what’s big now, but does it show like increasing or decreasing or…?

Chelsie Hall:
It does, it does. So with Chatter Score, effectively scoring a conversation on a daily basis or scoring a topic on a daily basis to understand how buzzy that conversation is, how much engagement there is around it, and when you can look at a conversation day over day and that way, again, just kind of like a heat map. You know, what, what are the most important elements of a conversation? Where is something heating up? Where something cooling down? You know, I almost think it’s like jumping in a helicopter and looking down on the conversation so you can get a really clear example of, you know, exactly where is the energy in this conversation.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Okay, that sounds awesome. Thanks. So as someone at the forefront of innovating in this video insight space, how do you stay up to date with what’s next in AI, social platforms, or even visual analytics?

Chelsie Hall:
I’d say at the end of the day, there’s so much coming out so fast. The speed of change is wild. And really just spending time on the platform, spending time. You know, I spent an incredible amount of time on TikTok, probably more than I should admit, but it’s, it’s just being a part of it. So you, you can’t just like read a Newsletter to stay updated on what’s going on. You got to be in it, you got to be building with the tech, you got to be trying out the tools. You’ve got to be in the social communities having the conversations. So I would say, like, not like I don’t. You don’t stand outside the pool and try to assess what’s going on inside the pool. You jump on in.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you’ve spoken a bit about how your tool doesn’t just rely on text. Can you speak to the role of machine learning and making sense of visual data or even the audio or how has this AI and machine learning evolved in the context of video social listening?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, well, I’m proud to say that’s really what we’ve done over the last four years at ViralMoment. We’ve pushed the ball forward and really built this. When we started ViralMoment, there was no way to read video. Video was just this black hole and you had to look at captions and that’s how you could understand what was happening. Like if you were lucky, you could try to figure out how to pull an audio transcript. We’ve really pushed the industry forward in being able to parse a video into insights into tags and understand what’s happening, what’s going on inside this video. How do people feel? I would say the magic and what I love about kind of a lot of the generative AI updates right now is, you know, reading one video is cool. It’s great to be able to say what’s happening inside this video. The magic and the magic that ViralMoment provides happens when we start to read hundreds of thousands of videos about a topic every single day. And now we can start to really get a good sense of what’s emerging, what’s going on in this conversation.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So a lot has happened in the last four years, but looking ahead five to 10 years, how do you envision the future of social intelligence, especially as we move beyond text based platforms?

Chelsie Hall:
Yeah, I mean, I guarantee you we’re all going to be using multimodal tools in the future because video is how we communicate. So I expect video intelligence is going to continue to increase and just be really important to understand and to master. The other thing I think I see with social is that it’s not just about social anymore. You know, social media used to again really just be about our networks and understanding our networks and talking to people we knew offline. But in a digital way. Now everything is sort of becoming social. I, I wanted a recipe the other day, so I went to TikTok and I looked at this recipe on a video instead of you going to a website. Amazon reviews are in video form now. I think just the way we communicate, you know, we’re, we’re on a video call right now, Jackie, and I can see your face. So I think the way that we communicate is going to continue to change and to evolve and to be digital and to be multimodal. And so social intelligence is going to have to continue to move forward quickly to capture the way that we communicate as a global society.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So thinking a little more old school, less multimodal perhaps. Are there any books or podcasts or individuals or thought leaders that have really influenced your thinking? Both as a founder of multiple businesses like you’ve mentioned, or ViralMoment, or even, even as a social insights expert?

Chelsie Hall:
I love building things and I’m always excited about people who are building new things. So I would say I love all the, a lot of the kind of goofy, startupy podcasts and I’m always seeing things there that I’m like, oh, people are building in this direction or this is how tools could work in the future. So I would say, like, I don’t have like a go to thing that I just absolutely love. I’m, I’m probably like all over the business podcast space. I, I love the communities also that I’m a part of. There’s a handful of different social intelligence or social listening communities where I’ve connected deeply with other people in the space. So I would say more than like a book or a podcast or something, just conversations with people who are deep in it at different organizations is probably the best way that I learn.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Excellent. So conversations and community sounds like a great place. So what advice would you give to other women considering careers and social insights and especially those, you know, who maybe aren’t drawn to the research side, but the tech and startup side of the field.

Chelsie Hall:
I think that tech and startups and people who are building, we need more women desperately in this space. When women have a strong voice into what is being built and a strong seat at the table, we tend to build more inclusive, more powerful tools. That diversity is incredibly important. So I would say go, run, do it, get out there. People might not invite you. Bring your own chair to the table and don’t be afraid to take up space is. Would be my advice. You know, if you’re kind of looking for an opportunity, like don’t wait, just go. And you have to like be bold and run at it.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So if a student asked you how best to prepare for a future in video based social listening or AI driven insights, what would you recommend they focus on?

Chelsie Hall:
I mean, I think again, this is a golden age for building and for trying and for getting into the weeds on things. Like I would say roll up your sleeves and go. So as much as like a book or a podcast could be great, I would say dive right into the pool. Like email a founder and ask them for access to their tool. If anyone ever wants access. You know, if a student’s ever interested in my tool, I’d be thrilled to give you, you know, a seat and the ability to try it out. I’m sure other founders and leaders would be too. Use AI to start doing some of your own analysis. Start, you know, talking about things on your own. So this is, this is a cool time where more technology is available than ever has been before. It’s more accessible than ever before. AI is making it so that like, you can start to launch your own research and projects. Dive in and get moving. And I would say if you’re interested in something, don’t wait. Just get started and start trying it and see if it’s really for you. Well, I feel inspired to roll up my sleeves and get out there and start giving it a go.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Thanks so much, Chelsie. It’s been great chatting with you and hearing a bit about your journey and excited to continue the conversation. Thank you so much.

Chelsie Hall:
Thank you for having me, Jackie. This has been blast and cheers, everybody.

Jackie Cuyvers:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation and taken away some valuable insights and advice from today’s guest. If you like this episode, please be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Spotify so you never miss an episode. And don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn for updates and additional resources. I’d like to take a minute to once again thank our interviewee for taking the time to join us on the show today and sharing her story and insights with us. Your contribution to the world of social intelligence is truly invaluable, and we’re so grateful for you sharing your time and expertise. And finally, if you listeners know of anyone else who would make a great guest on our show, please don’t hesitate to introduce us. We’re always on the lookout for new and inspiring stories.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Until next time, I’m Jackie Cuyvers, and this is the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. Thanks so much for listening.