I see a lot of conversations of people mentioning how expensive things have gotten, yet we see in sales data that our expensive products sell more (this is also due to the fact that more ad dollars are spent on higher margin products) but try and buy cheaper alternatives whenever you can.
I can tell you from the perspective of someone working in consumer insights for a consumer company, sales and retail data is far more important and influences decisions way more.
So I’d say put your money where your mouth is. If you don’t like certain companies or brands stop buying their products. If you think groceries are getting expensive buy cheaper alternatives or private labels. You can do this with a lot of non-food grocery items. Private label is almost always cheaper and you get pretty much the same shit as global brands.
There isn’t much to tell. We gather conversations and analyse it to understand consumer behaviour, trends, campaign performance etc.
If you don’t want your data showing up in social listening tools, make your social accounts as private as possible.
I wish lmao. But there are tons of data companies selling all kinds of data on people to whoever will pay them for it. Me working for identifying trends or what flavour of green tea is popular are less harmful use cases.
What we need is regulation to reign in big tech. These API licenses are expensive and I suspect is a big reason why Reddit ended free data sharing (which led to death of third party reddit clients).
I think coming out of an MBA, this is one of the less harmful jobs. I’d rather not be in consulting or investment banking or sales or big tech.
I’ve been working mostly on the analysis side of things, currently I do this for a consumer goods company.
And yes I do it to make a living. Got hired as an analyst in this field out of MBA and stayed in this. Also being chronically online and familiar with social networks helped.
There are dedicated tools, called Social Listening tools that do just these. Some examples are Brandwatch, Sprinklr, Talkwalker and Meltwater.
Not just Palantir, anyone and everyone is using these tools. From consumer companies to investment banks to your favourite content creator is using some kind of social listening to stay on top of trends and understand how you behave.
Reddit and Twitter are two social platforms that provide the most data openly and freely, and in reddit’s case you can get a lot of historical data without extra cost.
Your favourite candle brand, and your favourite outdoor clothing company and protein shake company is part of your favourite reddit community listening to what you’re talking about. They know if you like energy drinks, you might light heavily scented bath soaps too.
Deleted posts show up on these platforms quite often but when you click on them to go to reddit or twitter you’ll get a not found or deleted page.
PS: I’ve been working in social listening for last 8 years.
It’s only going to go up. Look at how revenues are increasing, it’s basically ad and PR money.