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The role of communications has changed. The expectations are higher. The margin for error is smaller.
Earning Your Seat is a podcast for communications leaders operating under changed expectations without a clear playbook.
Hosted by Dino Delic, Stephanie Lerdall, and Genevieve Brammall, the show places the hosts inside an experience many communicators recognize. Smart, capable leaders learning in real time how influence is earned, tested, and sustained.
Each episode features candid conversations with leaders across communications, data, media, and technology. Alongside those conversations, the hosts test ideas in real time, question what they have been taught, and confront where common advice breaks down under organizational pressure.
This is not aspirational thought leadership. It is a practical look at growth as it happens. How communicators earn trust, collaborate across functions, and lead with authority in a world moving faster than the role itself.
Pull up a chair. The work begins now.
Dino Delic (00:00):
This is Powered by Meltwater. Hi, I'm Dino Delic, and in the studio with me is Genevieve Brammall and Stephanie Lerdall.
Genevieve Brammall (00:22):
I'm Gen, and I'm the head of PR in News Corp Australia.
Stephanie Lerdall (00:26):
Hey, I'm Stephanie Lerdall. I lead comms for Morningstar, which is an investment research firm.
Dino Delic (00:31):
For a bit of context, I've asked Genevieve and Stephanie to join me as my co-hosts. They're two communications professionals at different stages of their career, and I know they're going to learn a lot about themselves from these industry experts I'm putting in front of them because I have an underlying motive. This is part podcast, part experiment, and part comms bootcamp. This is Earning Your Seat. There is an endless stream of conversations happening in communication. Each one vying for attention, each one telling us the next big thing to focus on. AI, social media, crisis management, leadership. Everyone's talking. But can we hear the right things? In today's world where everything feels urgent, but not always meaningful, it's easy to get caught up in trends or worse, start parroting what everyone else is saying. So what does it take to stay grounded in this storm of new ideas and technologies?
(01:30):
Nathan Carpenter joins us from the Atlas Lab, where he and his students aren't just studying social media, they're mapping influence, understanding networks, and questioning the very foundations of communication. We had an unexpected start to this conversation, diving right into the challenge that many universities face today. Can they keep up with the rapid pace of change in communications? Genevieve throws a tough question, Nathan's way, about how schools are adapting and whether they're truly preparing their students for the fast evolving world of PR and journalism.
Genevieve Brammall (02:08):
I've got one question. Many years ago, like over a decade ago, I was involved in an advisory board to one of the leading journalism schools here in Australia. And at the time, they were really looking at how to completely overhaul the curriculum to make sure that they were fit for purpose for a modern PR graduate. And I was struck by how the wisdom in wanting to evolve, but the fact that universities by their nature are quite slow in getting anything done. And I felt like by the time they'd actually probably got all their ducks in a row and decided on what the new strategy would be and what the curriculum would look like and who would be teaching it, that the world would've actually moved on and they'd be back to square one. So my question is, are universities keeping up with the speed of change in course curriculum?
(03:03):
And I suppose what more needs to be done in that space?
Nathan Carpenter (03:07):
Oh gosh, I love that question. And I can preface it with the fact that I'm in a really unique position within the university as well as within my own home college here. So I am technically staff and not a professor, despite holding a PhD, having now 20 years of teaching experience, and again, being really in and around the classroom, I am basically situated to live here in this lab and to make this lab work for our students, our faculty, our research faculty, and really anyone else in the university that finds use and value. And that question of whether or not we're keeping up, and especially curriculum is keeping up. I can answer that with a very clear, no, it never does and it never can. And I don't think it's designed to from somebody who's really been here, again, within university setting now for 20 plus years, this is an ongoing issue, this idea that we have to be at the speed of or ahead of industry all the time.
(04:09):
And what I would say is it's not the curriculum where we make up the gap though. It's all the other experiences where I think we do make up the gap. And so it kind of kills me a little bit to say this, that it's like we'll bring in classes and we'll look at the textbooks or whatever content. I mean, I've published a textbook and it's already out of date. It was out of date the minute we sent it to the publisher, but that's not the point in terms of are we at that same speed? Rather, are we providing students other opportunities to get to that speed beyond the curriculum and beyond the classroom? And so when I look at this lab behind me, and again, I'm biased. I mean, this is my livelihood here, but we're really thinking about what are the extracurricular opportunities, what are the personal enrichment opportunities?
(05:00):
What are ways that we can really just expose students to industry itself? So beyond my lab, I mean, I think a lot about things that my college does directly to, again, kind of make up for that gap between curriculum and preparing students. And several of the things that we do include essentially having what we call an office of career and corporate partnerships in that order. That is essentially designed to do that work of saying, how do we catch up and how do we make sure that we are, again, at that leading or bleeding edge in many cases? And so again, it's not necessarily the classroom where that's happening, it's all these other spaces. And I'd add to that. I mean, student organizations, I think, do an excellent job, at least on our campus where there's usually interest groups. And I see you nodding, Stephanie, I'm sure you were part of many in your experience as well, where these are industry aligned in many ways.
(05:58):
It's students who have a strong, strong interest in some sort of professional communication area. I mean, we have probably three or four public relations orgs that some might be a student run agency, another might be a special interest group around either a region or a heritage or something of that sort, and they kind of do that work of adding that real world element and that real world experience and interfacing with members from industry. So I think that's what's happening, if that makes sense. And I think that in practice has been working out well. I mean, when we look at our placement rates, again, I'm not necessarily one of the deans who can talk to exactly what those rates are, but for a college of journalism to say, "We're running a successful program, one of the best in the country when all the news around us is terrible news, journalism is dying and failing and imploding." And we're looking at that and saying, "We don't see that picture.
(06:56):
We see our students going out and doing other types of things because they're very well prepared and well networked."
Genevieve Brammall (07:03):
I'm very reassured that you're not seeing the death nail for journalism.
Dino Delic (07:08):
Okay. So social media came along a few years ago, decade ago or so on and everyone was like, "Oh, that's it. That's the death of traditional media." I feel like all these things keep happening that everybody says, "Oh, is it that we just enjoy watching something crumble and struggle?" But it keeps surviving and because we need it and trust, we keep talking about this in other episodes. It's all about trust. You need information. Where do you trust information? It ebbs and flows. I don't have a specific question, but I do want to talk about how if I think about somebody like a Stephanie who is meant to get a message out to establish a reputation and protect it, but also to connect with people. And even though maybe some of the ideal customers for Morningstar are not necessarily on social media themselves, Stephanie's spending a lot of time on social media for personal branding, but also for the company and they're doing podcasts and they're doing all this sort of stuff.
(08:04):
All this to say, it's like, what is happening right now? What should people be spending their time on? Because every day it feels like someone is saying like, "Well, now you got to do videos. Oh no, you just got to do press releases again." It's like, "Oh my God." Shouldn't we be making sense of it by studying the audience and seeing where are they spending their time? Is that part of what your lab does, studying the audience?
Nathan Carpenter (08:31):
I would love to be able to do that right now. And I think we have a couple of things that make that very difficult, which is access to audience data. So as a social media listening lab, we are very much focused on what is accessible, what is, I don't want to say what is legal per se, that's probably the wrong phrasing for it, but what is, again, kind of allowed by the platforms? We're kind of at their mercy for what we're allowed to study, especially in an academic context. So in some ways, we don't get the audience as much as we get the voices that are either the proponents or the people who are experiencing the changes happening as a result of AI. We have the content creators, we have the user generated content where they are talking about that day-to-day life that you just explained right there.
(09:24):
So in some ways they are an audience, but that other side that says we can find and hear who they're all broadcasting to and study them in depth, that takes us back to very old-fashioned models. We're talking classic social science research where we conduct surveys. Or if you think about how Nielsens do things, that side of audience is something that I think we sometimes overlook still as valuable. And again, being somebody in the fancy lab that does all the digital analytics, I have to constantly remind my students, and I have faculty that will say this too, they'll say, "You have to go back to the fundamentals in many cases or go back to very classic legacy kinds of ways of understanding audiences." But I do want to turn that around the other side as well in terms of understanding the situation, because even if we can't hear or understand the audience as a whole, what we can do is really understand the ecosystem.
(10:20):
And I think that's something that listening can do fantastically. Even if we don't have the best audience data possible, what we can really start to understand is basically mapping webs of influence. Like you're talking about this influencer who's selling an AI product and they really believe in it and you've got others who are a bit more skeptical. But the question I would have is, okay, what is this person doing to really build up this larger scale following? Or what does that following consist of? How is that person leveraging networks? And that's something I think that listening can do really well.
Dino Delic (10:54):
You guys dig into that. So obviously I'm thinking the basic social listening, which you're not a social listening lab, you're the social intelligence lab, right?
Nathan Carpenter (11:04):
We're both. Yeah, absolutely.
Dino Delic (11:06):
The name is social intelligence, right?
Nathan Carpenter (11:07):
It's called the Atlas Lab. And actually that's an important line. So we're the Atlas lab because we are mapping the digital landscape in a figurative way. And so we're trying to really understand the social fabrics, the cultural fabrics that make up everything that's going on out there. And we're usually directed by very specific research questions. And so something like the one that you're asking, can we understand these audiences or can we understand, again, who's basically creating or leveraging networks of influence? Those are things that we can track through traces of relationships and content creation and posts. That's the kind of work that we can absolutely do. I want to pose that to my students now tomorrow, essentially in that kind of question that you raised, Dino, how do we understand that group who might be either interested or getting tired of AI tools?
Dino Delic (12:04):
When Genevieve and Nathan were talking about journalism, what really struck me was how much of this isn't about doom and gloom. It's about trust, about figuring out who's paying attention, who's shaping the conversation, and how information flows in a world that sometimes feels like it's spinning faster than anyone can keep up. I mean, have you seen the news lately? Nathan kept circling back to this idea of listening, not just social listening in the basic sense, but listening to the ecosystem, who's creating content, who's amplifying it, and how networks of influence form in ways we don't always see at first glance. And it made me realize it's one thing to talk about followers and algorithms or AI hype, but it's another thing entirely to actually map out what's happening beneath the surface, which is exactly what we dive into next. Stephanie joins in and we start talking about the practical side of all of this.
(13:00):
Universities trying to manage reputations, stakeholders vying for attention, and how to figure out who to really listen to in a noisy, complex digital world. And let me tell you, it gets interesting real fast.
Stephanie Lerdall (13:15):
In a practical application, universities are having hard moment. They've got to fight reputational battles and manage dualing interests of stakeholders. How would you turn the lab on yourself and just make sense of what to do and who to listen to? And then how often do you see that when you map the influence mapping, there's fake, like there's bots?
Nathan Carpenter (13:46):
Yeah. So two really good questions. And the first being, again, how do we turn the lab on ourselves and listen really critically and I guess not introspectively, but rather thinking about our ecosystem, I mean the higher ed ecosystem. So just earlier this year, so this semester, so back in September, we actually worked with one of our internal centers here in the College of Journalism and Communications. It's called the Center for Public Interest Communication. They're all about finding fascinating research topics that are also good for the general public. And one of the projects we assisted with here in the lab was on higher ed. Their client was a higher ed foundation and that exact question of what do we know about higher ed and what perspectives are, again, influencing the space? And to do that listening and to kind of filter out what matters and what doesn't is the hardest work of all.
(14:44):
And so there are two things that we do to accommodate that. I mean, one is to really, really carefully craft our queries because we come in with a lot of assumptions about what higher ed is. In fact, we even did things like ask ChatGPT to give us language related to different perspectives in higher ed and see where that information was coming from. And the hard part is that tends to come from higher ed itself. And so it does you kind of no good to listen to everybody else in higher ed essentially saying the same thing. And so that's why working with this higher ed foundation became really interesting because they started to ask a different set of questions about things like, what is the ROI on higher ed and not from a higher ed perspective? Because we're used to saying things like graduation rates, retention rates.
(15:37):
And for them, it was this question of what else does a college degree do? And that then got us to think about who else do we listen to to tell us what that value is? And so we go then beyond students. We start thinking about industry and those relationships. We start thinking about culture. And by culture, we're talking broadly like lower KC culture, not high culture, museum culture, whatever that might be, but we're thinking about, are people thinking about what it means to learn within the university setting? Are people enriching themselves as well as obtaining licensure or obtaining a degree? And so that listening then is this process of discovering groups of people in specific spaces. So earlier, Dino, when you'd asked folks what they're using right now, I'm a big Reddit user because I don't post frequently, but I'm in that space regularly to really find, again, communities that can help discern a lot of these questions because they're self-organizing, self-identifying.
Dino Delic (16:45):
So what interests me about what Nathan is saying here is I've noticed that a lot of people often, when they have access to a lot of data, they obsess about the what, what happened, what was said, and how much. We love numbers and volume to put things into perspective, but one of the greatest things that puts things into perspective is the who and the how and the why. So without being too cryptic, what I like that Nathan is highlighting here is the focus on audiences. And for a communicator, there's nothing more powerful than understanding how different audiences perceive different messages and why certain messages are consistent across different groups and why they are not and how they travel. That allows you to design campaigns to speak to those audiences more authentically and to also know how other audiences might receive that exact same message if you choose to communicate with them in the exact same way.
(17:38):
So this is a great highlight and a reminder that to look at a dashboard that simply tells you the quantity of something, you really need to find a way to demonstrate the quality of something. And there's no better way to do that than by looking at how different audiences might react to different pieces of content or different messages.
Nathan Carpenter (17:57):
And we spent quite a bit of time in Reddit spaces that were unique to specific universities and types of universities. And these were where prospective students go to ask questions about, do I have a high enough GPA to get in? And once you kind of cancel out all those conversations, you start to see this other undercurrent of pressure coming from parents or coming from a sense of duty or responsibility to go get a degree in higher ed. And out of that, we kind of got the sense that the crises are many. And the new crisis that's kind of emerging there is certainly a cultural crisis where people believe in investing in themselves, but they don't see the university being the space that necessarily does that. They see it as a ticket to go somewhere else and not essentially a destination in and of itself that you can spend time there and grow and all of that.
(18:51):
So that's just an example of the kinds of things we could start picking apart and finding.
Stephanie Lerdall (18:55):
Just to wade into the hot water, when the US government is pulling funding for major universities and there are protests on major campuses, even if there's nothing happening on your campus at this moment, what are the signals that you're looking for to say, "This is coming my way or it isn't, and this is how I should respond." What do my stakeholders think about this topic and how might that change over time?
Nathan Carpenter (19:21):
Yeah, so signals are often leaders. We think about the classic influencers in many cases and following what leadership is saying in many cases and then seeing the responses to leadership matters a lot. And so I think some classic ones that we're seeing right now, like would be Harvard and Columbia to institutions in very similar situations in terms of being under pressure from the administration in the White House, and in some moments caving and in other moments really putting up resistance and basically seeing that the dominoes either fall or get stacked up again in response to that. And so for us, it's this question of you have to be plugged into the news on such a regular basis to know which university is next, so to speak. And then you're finding those names, you're finding those voices and really paying attention to how they're taken up.
(20:19):
And that part is really tricky. We're not dedicated to do that full-time, but we definitely saw evidence of that doing this higher ed project. And so that's a group of voices. The other group we follow, and sorry for our friends in Australia, we have to wade into American politics a little bit here, but what we're often doing is following figures within parties. They kind of make it easy because all we have to really do is plug in like higher education and then a list of their accounts basically. And then I can either set up alerts or whatever that might be. But as soon as some of them are highlighting higher ed or talking about a specific campus, we're alerted right away. And typically we can create those in two lists based on red and blue or left and right.
Dino Delic (21:03):
I'm going to jump in there, sorry, but I'll tell you about DoorDash. One of the ladies that we are trying to have on the podcast is she was a director at DoorDash. And I remember being curious, I don't think I've seen that title before that we support somebody in that role with Meltwater because she was paid media. She was Director of Public Affairs Paid Media. And I was like, hang on a second. I've never seen those phrases together. And what's happening is legislators, leaders, you use the word, privately, they say nice things about us. They take our money and they say like, "Yeah, we want to support you, your employers, blah, blah, blah, and you fund my campaign. Sure, you got deep pockets, but publicly they're like down with DoorDash and all this sort of stuff." And so they're trying to influence them with ads.
(21:49):
And I remember saying to her, I was like, "Mora, they're not leaders then." They're only doing that publicly shaming you. They're tweeting about you badly because they're caving to what the public wants, but privately they're taking your money. That's not leadership. Leadership these days is democratized. This is Dino opinion. But now you could have loud voices, could be students, could be Greta Thunberg, like a little 12-year-old or whatever she was when she decided to skip school. And then she becomes a leader because she has a loud enough voice and a platform and she starts to stand for something. So it's interesting you're talking about like paying attention to topics and I'm not discrediting it, but I am having a fun conversation with you about, it's one thing to pay attention to what politicians are doing, but maybe this is an Australian criticizing American politicians. Well, they just say whatever the crowd needs to hear them say, but then also privately they say other stuff.
(22:41):
And that then throws you off if you're trying to pay attention to what's happening on social media and drive decision making as a result of it. So if you're a university that's trying to figure out should we speak out about a topic or not, to see when someone in a state legislature or the US Congress says higher education, you could freak out about that, but I would be freaking out more about what led to them being comfortable saying that because there's very few leaders, and this is controversial, but very few people taking a stand. They're doing it based on what they're seeing in the public and making them comfortable saying that.
Nathan Carpenter (23:16):
I'd say the American system has changed quite a bit from that notion of there being influencers fairly separated from leaders. What we're getting right now is almost a direct stream. And so there are definitely operatives, again, we could probably call them them influencers. There are networks where they basically suggest an idea and they know by them putting that out there within the next five minutes or so, they have a bunch of senators or representatives that will immediately repost that, quote that, work with that content. Are they colluding? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Stephanie, what I'm talking
Dino Delic (24:00):
About with somebody- Are they like, "Hey, I'm going to post this tomorrow and I'm going to post what you want to say, but you can't say and you'll repost it. "
Nathan Carpenter (24:06):
Yeah, I would not doubt it. I would not doubt it.
Dino Delic (24:08):
I'm now starting to understand how social media works.
Nathan Carpenter (24:11):
There is some very direct collusion for sure, but there's also indirect in that when we call them leaders, I guess, we have people in power and in office who know who to follow immediately to basically influence or to direct the route that policy is going to take. And what's very interesting, and I won't go into any of the details in this case, I'm in the state of Florida, there's definitely networks of influence like that. So when you talk about there are other leaders for us or other influencers to follow, they're on our list, they're basically the same as though they are state legislators or the same as though they are representatives.
Dino Delic (24:56):
So interestingly, this concept of networks of influence keeps coming up and that's why Nathan keeps talking about mapping different networks. And the lesson for me there is that marketers and communicators can then move or shift from fixating on making a message as appealing to as many people as possible and go take their focus towards making the message so engaging with a few key people that are going to take action and they're going to engage so that other people take notice. So it's really all about identifying the right message for the right person at the right time versus finding something that appeals to as many people as possible because what we've learned time and time again is those end up being the least effective campaigns. Is it like that in Australia, Gen?
Genevieve Brammall (25:43):
I think this is above my pay grade.
Dino Delic (25:45):
Well, you were hanging out with the Prime Minister a few weeks ago, so come on, you know a thing or two.
Genevieve Brammall (25:48):
I mean, look, I would assume so. I mean, I don't know. I'm not an authority in this space whatsoever, but this is modern lobbying, right? It's modern political influence just in a different place. And so yeah, I mean, I can't speak to the accuracy of what's happening here because I don't know, but I would assume that people will find ways to wield influence and to newsjack a conversation using whatever modern means they can. So if it's happening there, it's probably happening here too.
Dino Delic (26:23):
Up to this point, we've been tracing the complex webs of influence, universities under pressure, leaders in operative shaping conversations, and the ways social media amplifies voices we might not even realize are in play. Nathan and Stephanie have been unpacking that whole ecosystem, and I hope you were taking notes, but most of us aren't sitting in an Atlas lab with access to massive data sets or advanced queries or teams of students passing Reddit threads and political networks, which raises the question, how do you actually do this in the real world on a practical level? How can anyone, even without a fancy toolkit or a big budget, start to listen smarter, see the bigger picture and understand influence beyond just what people are saying? It's a shift from theory to practice, and for the rest of this episode, that's exactly the journey we're on.
Genevieve Brammall (27:16):
Can I just take the question somewhere slightly different because I love practical examples, and I think the more that we can bring in some of those into our conversations, the better. So I'm intrigued by your backdrop. As I said, looks really fancy and our listeners are probably not going to have access to the Atlas Lab. And so for practitioners who don't have access to a lab and a whole team of students and probably invest in one tool or don't have the budgets to be spending on multiple different listening tools, I think that they probably have a tendency to just get what they get, extract the data and just hear what people are saying. But can you walk us through a real example of how a company might get stuck at just what people are saying and miss that bigger picture and how do we take on that umbrella view without the lab?
Nathan Carpenter (28:19):
Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll have to speak in hypotheticals and I'm going to try to draw from several of the clients we've worked with without naming them by name, but let's think of, oh goodness, a couple of cases where policy is really at stake. So this isn't a client, but this is something we watched really closely here. So in Florida last year, we had two major ballot initiatives basically go up for a public referendum. One was on legalization of marijuana within the state, and then the second was on legalization of abortion at a certain stage. And so basically trying to enshrine both of these into the state constitution. And what we saw from a variety of perspectives was very interesting. If we were to just do classic social listening and to say, "We're going to create a monitor or we're going to look up major accounts using these keywords and terms and all of that.
(29:22):
" And if we were to run those and based on volume and engagement and all of that, surely both of these would win hands down, like the public spread and share of this information, hands down, these should pass. Well, again, one of the classic blenders of a lot of listening is, again, the noisiness of a particular author or a subset of users to the actual impact, especially if we're thinking about something like voting or something like participating in election. We could find all sorts of organizations and then we start to discover That they're a network that are all under the same funding organization and they're all broadcasting very similar messages. Things are very closely orchestrated. And that's all we're hearing in the listening because we are either not expanding the scope or we're realizing that many people are so exhausted with politics that they don't want to talk about them in that space.
(30:25):
And so one of the things that listening essentially missed out on in that moment was how else were these messages essentially being shared? And so if we're thinking about, again, people who don't have the lab or who don't have the agency or have the fancy toolkits, I start to really think about what are the quote unquote freely available tools that are still out there at your disposal. And so some of those would be things like just your ability to really query some of the social platforms at hand. Because if all of us in this room have done at least some sort of social listening and you know what a difficulty it is to do work on Meta's platforms, for example. Any social listening you do there is essentially going to give you public pages or influencer accounts. And that is essentially going to just be feedback, especially for an election like this.
(31:21):
And so what we ended up really doing with some of my students was to say, let's try to turn that around in some other way and think about some other ways to measure influence and attempts at influence and just again, listening in spaces that wouldn't be picked up by the big tools. And community groups are pretty good at that. Again, we're not listening in order to gather data, but we're rather out there collecting observations. And just by going into, I think every community has some sort of word of mouth Facebook page. Just going into those spaces and knowing how to query correctly within the Facebook platform allowed my students to gather a wide diversity of perspectives on these issues that they were not seeing before. And the cool thing with that though is that that gave them a new set of terms to look for that they weren't thinking of.
Dino Delic (32:15):
Oh, the vernacular and zeitgeist of that particular lunch table in the cafeteria.
Nathan Carpenter (32:20):
Exactly. So yeah, going to the new tables in the cafeteria changes then what you start to look for. And then they're finding these conversations in unexpected spaces. And the best part about that is they didn't have to, again, buy an add-on to some fancy tool to make the search better or anything like that. It was quite really going somewhere else to listen that was, again, just not quote unquote supported by the platform, but they needed to have that knowledge of the platforms too. And so you also have to have an understanding of the ecosystem to say, if I'm listening to Facebook and I need everyday engagements and interactions and conversations, I have to get out of the paid system and go somewhere else for a while. And earlier when I said, it's one of the reasons I love Reddit, very similar. I can query Reddit pretty extensively.
(33:10):
One of the things I'll often teach as well is ways to gather data. There are lots of data dumps out there of Reddit data that you can then kind of obtain small samplings from and then write very complex queries that Reddit can't handle. And those are essentially free. And that's one way we kind of work around some of the issues of gaining access.
Dino Delic (33:33):
Wait, what's a data dump of Reddit look like?
Nathan Carpenter (33:36):
So there have been several, I don't know how best to describe them, but they are either academics that have gone a little rogue or they used to be connected or sponsored by Reddit.
Dino Delic (33:47):
So they're like API pools?
Nathan Carpenter (33:49):
Yeah, yeah, they're API polls. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a community that basically gathers these monthly or daily in some cases, and they'll sponsor them through, there's a site called Academic Torrents.
Dino Delic (34:00):
Sounds very Pirate Bay-ish.
Nathan Carpenter (34:01):
Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. Now we don't touch the torrents. That's one of those on campus. Everybody knows, do not click that button. That'll get you in trouble right away. But there are other people that have created projects off of those torrents that allow you to do things like...
Dino Delic (34:16):
Oh, so you can touch laundered stolen goods, but okay. Got it.
Nathan Carpenter (34:20):
But you're going to get me into trouble now. Yeah. But no, we talked about it was like community supported or sponsored. There are some free academic tools that actually query the API. I'm
Dino Delic (34:29):
Picking up on the right guys here. Now I know what to look for, communities sponsored data dump.
Nathan Carpenter (34:34):
Yeah. Yeah. It's sponsored, but then they're queryable. And I guess the big picture I'm trying to pull together here is, do you know the platforms? Do you know how to work with them and query them? One thing I've spent a lot of time over the past two years here at Florida is we have a lot of students interested in YouTube, which is fabulous. I mean, we can get a lot of YouTube data and information, but in many cases, they're doing deeper analyses and they need to spend a lot of time actually in the platform reviewing video and looking at when comments appear and all that. So they need to be in that space. And to be able to tell them, do you know Google's query system? Do you understand they have an entire query syntax that very few people know or recognize? And if you've done any Boolean logic searching, it's familiar once you see it, but you have to go find it and you have to work with that.
Dino Delic (35:27):
So are you saying that, because what we're talking about is tools and techniques. And one of the techniques obviously is typing in queries, but it also sounds like, and maybe I'm just misconstruing what you're saying, but observing the structure of the platform, but also the general behavior on the platform is also a key part of the listening where someone has to understand what that platform is used for and how in order to then understand what to look for. If you were to try to take a complete novice, an alien that dropped off another planet and came here and said, "Okay, this is social media and this is how to listen," obviously that's not your population because the students these days are obviously savvier than I am, but how do you get someone like the foundational level of this is what social listening is, and then this is how you get to the black belt
Nathan Carpenter (36:12):
Level? Let me start with something earlier you had mentioned, which is understanding the ecosystem itself. At a foundational level, if I'm teaching social listening, I'm telling students that you don't rely just on the omnibus everything overview as the entire story. That's the square one place that you start to say, "Oh, I got data." You have to go through that process of segmentation and buy platform or buy other things. The other part is just, again, like we were just talking about is different platforms have very different, user bases have very different assumed politics. I don't want to say that they have automatically, like Twitter has shifted over the years now and Reddit has shifted over the years and I guess 4chan will always be the same, but these spaces are in flux and you have to know where they are and where they stand in these different moments.
(37:05):
The other part for what you just mentioned, how do you take somebody into, I guess, more black belt listening or analytics or monitoring or whatever that might be is going to be a lot of time and practice because there's certain things that, let's say like some of the most basics like over my shoulder here, we're looking at some just really, really old data. I'm showcasing tomorrow about Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. We're hitting the first anniversaries of those hurricanes and we've got a big contingency of emergency management minded folks coming through campus tomorrow to ask a lot of questions about that. And if I think about emergency management and listening and some of the foundational versus advanced work that you need to be doing, it's that work of being able to kind of start to assume the language of those who you are trying to listen to so that you can find them, which kind of sounds contradictory.
(38:08):
You have to know where to begin in a query. So if we're thinking emergency management, we're thinking hurricanes, yes, people are going to be typing hurricane in their social media, and that's an easy thing to find. But if you're in a particular area doing listening like emergency management, you know the rest of the language to begin to look for. And if I'm not in that field, I have to be able to reach out and ask the right people for that next set of queries or that next set of language that would be used to begin to identify the rest of the conversation. And so it goes beyond the platform. It starts to go into your basic ability to manage and interface with other professionals who are the subject matter experts in these spaces. And so again, I'm looking at the spike behind me and it's awful.
(38:57):
It doesn't show me anything.
Dino Delic (38:59):
What Nathan and Genevieve have been walking us through is bigger than just tools and dashboards. This part of the episode is really about how to listen well. Even without a team of students or a room full of screens, you can start to spot patterns. You can find signals in community forums, Facebook groups, or Reddit threads, places where people are actually sharing their experiences and asking questions. It's messy, it's human, and it's way more insightful than just looking at mentions or engagement stats. Sit tight. Here's what you need. I think we've solved it. I think we've solved it. We obviously don't have time to get into all of the benefits and the challenges and perils that AI brings to what you do. There is one question that we ask every guest, and I was really excited to ask you this question because it's the same question that we ask everyone, but it's if you were in the ear of a communications leader that was trying to earn a seat at the table, it's what Stephanie's doing.
(39:59):
She reports directly to the CEO of Morningstar Financial. She already has a seat at the table. Gen as well, she reports the high ups in where she is. Based on your expertise, what's one thing that you would advise people like Gen and Steph to start doing to better earn that seat at the table and keep it? I think there's not enough use ... This is my opinion. There's not enough collaboration and usage of social listening for the betterment of data-driven communications because communications is often accused of being not data-driven and working on assumptions. And I've always said one of the greatest benefits of Meltwater having news and social in one platform is that now my favorite example was Western Governor's University, friend of mine. We met through my cousin who had me over to his bachelor party, and we find out that we're both in the same space.
(40:53):
He's in PR, but he's at Western Governor's University. He's like, "Oh, I'll give you a call sometime. I think we're looking at tools." And so I'm giving a demo to this guy and I'm like, "I don't really want to sell to him. He's kind of a friend." So I was very like no standard sales approach. And I just said to him, "All right, I'll show you this tool. I think this could save you a lot of time. It's going to help you track the media coverage that you get, but it's going to score it. So what's a campaign that you're working on right now?" "Oh, I have a great one. We're trying to reach legislators. ""Awesome. Give me the target list of publications." And he gives me the target list and I said, "Cool. Just out of curiosity, how'd you build this list?" Oh, we all sat in a room and just said, "What do we think legislators read?" I was like, "Wait, you did that?
(41:31):
" I'm like, "Well, do you know there's tools out there that will tell you? " And I then took all the handovers-
Stephanie Lerdall (41:37):
Not that money. Not that many, Dina.
Dino Delic (41:40):
That's what led me to where I am today because I realized like, "Oh wow, there's a lot of things that are based on assumptions." And meanwhile, there's tools out there. And so what I did was I took all the Twitter handles of all the US Congress that year, put it into audience. Have you heard of Audience with an S, audiense.com?
Nathan Carpenter (41:58):
No, no.
Dino Delic (42:00):
Basically, it scrapes everything that a Twitter handle does and says, "Who do you follow? Who do you like? When, what time?" It does all this psychographic profiling. And I said, "I could show you a tool." It then shows you this is how these people behave. Even if they don't post, if they have a public Twitter handle, I can see all of the information. It's big data ingestion. I can find the patents. Who do they follow? And they were nice, clean clusters. Here's all the Democrats, here's all the Republicans, here's all the people that are sort of in the middle, not that many, and here's where they get their news from. Oh, look at these guys, retweeting Fox, look at these guys, retweeting MSNBC. So I said, "If you want to know how you can reach these people, did you know that this information is just out there?" Because the world has changed.
(42:44):
Where I was going with this is that because of all these tools and because of all these things that you can do with them, I think that a lot of communicators either don't know that they have those tools available or they just trust that there's another team that does that. And they think, "Oh, that's their jurisdiction." But okay, how often do you share information with that other team? So let me go back to the question without feeding you the answer, knowing what you know, what's one thing that communications leaders today can start doing to better be a trusted advisor to their C-suite.
Nathan Carpenter (43:16):
Yeah. Okay. So again, take this with the fact that I'm working with students very directly all the time and I'm in an academic environment which has its own hierarchies. But given that, I think knowing who you trust in an organization to basically tell you what it is as it is in a truthful manner and knowing who each of those people are within that organization, and again, this is a non-technical answer, but knowing that within an organization and again, knowing who those people are matters way more than anything else. And I can give you my example for that, which is I've been here now, I'm in my third year, which is still very much rookie status in this space, huge R1 institution. But when I look around at what's really helped me succeed, it was really quickly being able to identify, and we weren't talking allies.
(44:15):
We're not talking people who are going to be helpful or whatever, but rather people who I know aren't making things up on the fly as they go, people who are actually committed to what they do, people who are providing trustworthy information and all of that, and being able to say, "Here's how that all works together." And so that way when I've got these moments where, gosh, we need to do some fundraising, it's not that I have to go find my best friend or worry about the politics of it all, but I know that that fundraiser is a person who's really effective and that I can be confident that they're going to be able to work with me. And so in that setting, if that's going to be the thing that I know when I'm trying to get a seat at the table, it is basically, do I know how to navigate those systems in an effective manner?
(45:03):
If I'm going to connect that back to listening, like Stephanie, at the very beginning, when you're talking about your organization does very little because you're B2B, I would flip that around and say, "You are doing monitoring because you were focused on your company." And listening is a really proactive process where you are thinking about, again, I throw the word ecosystem around it's small change, but it's a really important concept. And so I would say have that knowledge of the ecosystem of the other ... It can be peers and competitors. For me, I'm always following what the other social media labs are doing because I don't want to suddenly have my deans someday say they have a great blog over there. They've got students creating some amazing content and they're all thought leaders now because they're scooping us and they're getting coverage or they've got a Substack that's now going, whatever.
(45:55):
I should know that in advance. And so if you're going to ask anything of leadership, and I'm going to turn that on YouTube here where it's not just what you know when you come to the table, but when you are at the table, make sure you ask leadership essentially for that time to be able to do the listening.
(46:14):
And a lot of the consulting I've been doing with our local organizations, we work a lot with groups out of the Florida Public Relations Association. But when I talk to members of that organization, like nonprofits, businesses, whatever, I always tell them, make sure either you get the time or that if you are in leadership, you are giving people that time to do that kind of listening and research so that you understand what else is going on around you. Because again, listening is so proactive. You can't just monitor and be reactive the entire time and say like, "Oh, we saw a change in what we're doing." You've got to have that sense out there. And social listening's a part of that. It's not the whole picture, but it can give you a lot of that insight to know that ecosystem.
Dino Delic (46:58):
Stephanie, you spend money with Sprinklr, but is that primarily on the engagement side of things? Obviously they're not that great at listening.
Stephanie Lerdall (47:06):
Yeah, it's pretty much on the content management side without getting into the specific tools. Listening is not that easy if it's not about your company in that tool because you're restricted on volume. So if you want to listen about investing, woo, you hit your limit.
Nathan Carpenter (47:21):
Yeah, not to get into tools either, but I mean, we really try to diversify the tools. And so we have some that we can give students a lot of free reins so they can at least learn what listening looks and feels like and apply it to anything of their interest, which certainly helps. But then we have others where it's like tools that we can plug students into are really limited either in terms of like timeframe or social platforms that they draw from. And so we might have others that are deeper we use for more advanced classes or students or we use for like the actual client work that we do as a lab instead. So being able to diversify that can matter a lot. We're lucky enough we're resourced to do that, but that's just at least a way to think about it. I try not to do like a one-stop shop for listening when I can help it.
(48:06):
We're talking with Gen, figuring out what some of the open source or free solutions are to do listening. Again, getting really good at that. It's kind of the low level technical side, but just can you query some of these platforms in ways that are going to generate some solid results for you too?
Stephanie Lerdall (48:23):
When you first started talking about being that, knowing who's the person that's going to tell it to you straight and be a truthful source of information, to me, that is what I'm trying to do. If nothing else, the CEO needs to know that I'm going to say that presentation wasn't good and such and such is talking about how your back and someone's going to deliver the hard moves and so it's important to be that, but you can only do that to your point if you also have those people who are going to steer you the right way.
Dino Delic (48:57):
I think this is a perfect place to end the episode, but before you press stop, let me give you a little more. Our goal today wasn't to send you into a panic over the fast moving, ever evolving digital circus we're all a part of. No, it was about getting a little more comfortable in the chaos. Nathan pulled back the curtain on how universities, businesses, and communicators are all scrambling to keep up. And let's just say it's not pretty and you don't have to chase every new trend or frantically learn a dozen new tools. It's not just about social listening now. It's about mapping the entire ecosystem of influence where even the smallest voices ... It's not just about social listening now. It's about mapping the entire ecosystem of influence, where even the smallest voices move the needle in ways that aren't always obvious. The real magic happens when you dig into the patterns beneath the noise.
(49:51):
And even if Nathan's fancy lab has you thinking you need a big budget and a high tech setup, the truth is you don't. Whether you're a university scrambling to stay relevant or a comms pro trying to make sense of it all, real listening is all about seeing the threads everyone else misses.
(50:11):
Earning your seat isn't about passively absorbing, it's about executing. Take a moment and reflect and think about how you can use what you've just learned in this episode to grow, recalibrate, and improve. Thanks for listening. I'm Dino Delich. We'll see you next time on the next episode of Earning Your Seat.