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Women in Tech and Social Listening: Convosphere’s week at Web Summit 2018

That was the week that was. From the packed BA flight on Monday afternoon (overheard from the nervous stewardess: “I’ve never seen so many gold cards…!”) to the snaking entrance queue on Tuesday morning, it was clear that Lisbon was the place to be on 5th November 2018. I joined the other members in our #womenintech team – Jackie Cuyvers, Natália Leao and Tamara Lucas who travelled from London, Porto and Madrid respectively – for four days of learning and meeting like-minded social media data nerds.

Web Summit 2018
Tens of thousands of people queued to enter the buzzing conference halls.

Our winner for the speech with most audience agreement was Elaine Rodrigo, Danone’s Chief Strategy and Insight Officer, talking about how social listening is crucial for Danone, in particular for spotting up-coming food trends as social is a popular environment for talking about food. It was a great example of a company using social listening to make data-driven business decisions. In using social data for audience segmentation (or ‘tribes’ as they call it), Danone has found that social is tearing up some of the traditional segments. For example, the top segment interested in beer in France turned out to be cooking enthusiasts aged 45 plus, while young males were more into the tech-segment dominated champagne.

From these 16 tribes, Danone brand Volvic created 16 different short YouTube clips designed to appeal to a specific tribe and found that ad recall lifted by 40%. Danone’s usage of social data is undeniably driving growth, innovation and brand experience. About their new methodologies, Elaine Rodrigo said social listening was “very new for Danone but we are very pleased and going to keep pushing. Data and technology can provide us with a deep insight into our consumers. We want to do more.“ We enthusiastically joined the applause!

Web Summit 2018 Danone Visual Wheel of Health
Danone’s Visual Wheel of Health.

Elaine Rodrigo also touched on one of the key themes we saw at Web Summit: how can we leverage visual social content to gain insight? Danone has worked with partners to create an AI-driven semiotic machine to search visual images online and create a visual wheel of interests by region. In a similar vein, the Pinterest CEO, Ben Silbermann, spoke on “Is the future of search visual?” and the growing capability of searching images. Here at Convospere, visual content is something that we have begun to incorporate as part of our social listening services. Consumers frequently communicate with an image either on its own (it’s worth a thousand words after all, which is handy when you are limited to 280 characters) or in the context of the point of consumption moment.

One of the most fascinating talks I attended was by Heineken’s marketing leader, Ian Wilson, who covered how the brand is using data to be at the forefront of the mobile-first world.  Their four-step process – gather data, segment their audience, build smart creative and measure ROI – would be ideally supported with social listening. Social media data would be a great supplement to their limited first-party data (customers typically don’t sign up to buy beer) and secondary data (from EPOS and brand partners) and would allow potential augmentation or refinement of audience segmentation. Where social data can truly excel is in the measurement of ROI, looked at alongside sales data (which often lag), to quantify and validate engagement and resonance.

Innovation booth at Web Summit 2018
Line-up: Louise, Tamara and Natália at the British trade stand, which promoted the innovation of the British tech industry.

Other highlights included a mentoring session for Tamara Lucas, our Country Manager in Spain, by Gillian Tans, the CEO of Booking.com no less, in the #womenintech lounge shortly before her excellent speech on tackling the gender gap in the workplace. With a female co-founder and CEO and a 60% female employee base, it’s something we are proud to have conquered here at Convosphere.

Looking forward to seeing you at Web Summit 2019!

To learn more about our social and visual listening offering, contact us today.