I chose to attend “The Power of Social Listening at The Body Shop”. Jennifer Rice, the director of customer strategy and analytics at The Body Shop, was one of the presenters. Rice described how it is hard to track how companies are doing in terms of buzz. It gets expensive to run a brand tracker monthly or quarterly. Social listening is a method of tracking buzz and popularity. By tracking metrics and data on social media, a company can learn tons about how their brand is doing.

The Body Shop seeks to know what is being said about them online and tracks this by looking at their earned mentions. An earned mention differs from a paid mention because earned mentions are everyday people discussing the brand online. On the contrary, paid mentions are mentions that are paid for by the brand to generate brand awareness. Jennifer Rice and her team stress the importance of knowing how people are positively or negatively reacting to The Body Shop online.

Social listening can also be used in specific circumstances. Jennifer Rice spoke on how The Body Shop relaunched body butters in 2021. This was a huge campaign for the company, so the team at The Body Shop set up a different dashboard to specifically track the social media metrics on body butters. By looking at these metrics, the team was able to gather an understanding of how customers felt about the change in the body butters. In situations like these, social listening can help companies to better understand what customers want.

Jennifer Rice’s presentation was dedicated to answering how The Body Shop is growing as a mature brand. The Body Shop’s methods have changed, but their core values have stayed the same. Social listening is a relatively new concept, but it can do wonders for companies that want to get to know their audiences directly.

Since Coca-Cola is a top employer for new graduates, I would like to interview someone that works at Coca-Cola. Quinton Ferris is a JCCC alumni that works as an accountant at Coca-Cola.

I would ask:

How did you get in touch with Coca-Cola?

I see that you graduated from JCCC and KSU, how did these schools prepare you for your career?

What internships/ volunteer-work did you do to prepare yourself for the professional world?

As an accountant, what do you do at Coca-Cola?

What makes your job differ from an accountant job at another company?