Social Listening B2B Case Study
Sky Stephenson is the Head of Social Media for S&P Global Commodity Insights, a Fortune 500 company, managing a large portfolio of social channels focused on the financial services market in relation to commodities. Previously Sky worked at Vodafone for 6 years in the role of Market and Insights manager with a focus on communications and digital strategy.
One of four divisions of S&P Global, S&P Global Commodity Insights is responsible for delivering insights to empower their customers to make strong decisions in business and trading. As the leading independent provider of information and benchmarking for the commodities and energy markets, their coverage includes oil and gas, power, petrochemicals, metals, agriculture and shipping. S&P Global Commodity Insights provides customers in over 150 countries with expert reporting to increase market clarity and productivity.
“We weren’t where we needed to be, some people were happy with what they were getting, some people weren’t getting anything. Now we are in a place where, I can see on a day to day basis those differences”
The Challenge
S&P Global were looking for an agency partner to optimise their social listening efforts to save time and resources. They were running at capacity, and felt that valuable hours were being spent on repetitive reporting, data-crunching and administrative tasks, leaving no time for strategic activity informed by their data. They were aware that such practices could be streamlined and outsourced to allow their team to focus on more integral, productive and critical work.
As their chosen vendor, Ten Bear Group identified three key requirements from S&P: informing the C-Suite and stakeholders with more than just metrics creating a focus on the “why” behind the data, a social listening framework that provides continuous actionable industry insights, and a social insights manager focused fully on guiding strategy – not just collecting metrics.
The Solution
Ten Bear Group was brought on by S&P to design and implement a new system for reporting. This was the first time that the Commodity Insights team had experienced reporting of this nature within the business; therefore, Ten Bear helped guide their initial requests into their desired reporting outcomes.
We believe this is never a one-stop process and the S&P team trusts us to provide regularly tailored reports to meet new strategic needs on a monthly and bi-weekly basis.
Upon his joining the company in September 2021, we were able to work closely with Sky, to reshape the reports with a focus on content strategy and team-specific insights. To identify these insights, we carried out stakeholder mapping within S&P. This involved interviews with all the relevant key stakeholders, using the information provided to understand what each of them take from the current reporting – and what they were missing. Armed with this, we then looked at how the insight is applied, what they need in order to make it actionable, and how the reports can feed into their strategy and output.
Having completely restructured S&P’s monthly reports in line with their social listening strategy, insights are now more concise and manageable for maximum efficiency. As the previous reports were particularly data and metric heavy, strategic considerations have been implemented throughout the redesign process to reduce the time to insight.
Stakeholder intelligence was used to structure both the report and subsequent social listening framework; key individuals were interviewed to identify team-specific requirements. Working closely with Sky, we were able to reach a higher number of stakeholders to elevate S&P’s operations processes and accessibility.
A significant increase in report digestion has been achieved by including personalised links to key insights for individual team members. This is also replicated in the report email, which allows employees to click through to the slides in the report relevant to them. Feedback to this was very positive: the teams found it granted faster access to their insights and enabled a more organic flow of information through the business.
The Outcome
S&P has undergone a significant overhaul of its reporting structure to place a greater emphasis on strategic insights and content strategy. With the new structure in place, insights are easily accessible and clearly marked for those who need them. As a result of this new approach, the company has seen a marked increase in employee engagement with the reports.
The number of employees who are both requesting and using the reports has risen dramatically, reflecting the value that they provide. To further capitalise on the insights contained within the reports, monthly meetings have been established with key teams to discuss the findings and create actionable plans. These meetings allow for open dialogue and collaboration, resulting in a more dynamic and effective use of the reports.
In short, the new reporting structure has helped S&P to better utilise data to drive business decisions and achieve their goals.
Now there’s more people wanting to read the reports, they are interacting with them, they are saying ‘this is valuable to me’ and I want to see this more regularly.”
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