Episode 315 / Molly Peel / The Red Carnation Hotel Collection / Head of Social Media

Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, marketers need to treat data like a review, says Molly Peel, Head of Social Media at the Red Carnation Hotel Collection. "Real value comes from understanding why the content performs the way it does, and using those insights to shape your strategies."

Molly likes to ask deeper questions, such as what people really like and what they are engaging with, and to then take that information to inform future work. This is why her shiny new object is predictive analysis. Looking ahead with a proactive approach, she uses data to search for patterns, overlays qualitative insights, and tries to determine what will perform well in the future.
At the Red Carnation Hotel Collection, one way to do this is by using social intelligence to help identify emerging themes and sentiment shifts on consumers' side. It's not about replacing creativity, but sharpening it based on signals that AI can help pull out (which maybe would have been missed otherwise).

Learn more on this method and listen to Molly reflect on how she wants her career to be remembered and what her top data driven marketing tips are, in the full episode.

The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.

Molly Peel 0:00
Don't just look at the vanity metrics. It's all about sort of, who are you really talking to, and how are they talking to you. And that's how you can really tell I think what your audience wants.

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Tom Ollerton 0:48
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, and this is a weekly podcast about the future of data driven marketing every week or so, of the pleasure and privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders and this week is no different, but it's actually very different. I am sat in front of a large painting of the Queen overlooking Buckingham Palace because I'm in the Rubens at the Palace Hotel, which is part of the Red Carnation hotel collection. And I'm with Molly Peel, who has made this experience possible, and she's the head of social media at the Red Carnation Hotel Collection. So Molly, thank you for the first podcast I've ever done in a hotel room and a very, very nice hotel room at that. Could you give the audience just a bit of background on who you are and what you do?

Molly Peel 1:43
Of course. So thank you so much for having me and for remembering the hotel name as well. Or there's a, you know, bonus point for that.

Tom Ollerton 1:51
It's written on a complimentary cookie... isn't that a selling point that you get, like a nice little?

Molly Peel 1:57
Absolutely. I can tell you a bit more about that in a minute. So, yeah. My name is Molly. I am the head of social for Red Carnation Hotels. I've been with the company for about four years now. Previously, I dabbled in a bit of music. Thought I was going to become a pop star. That dream was quite quickly shattered. And you know, here I am. I've landed myself a job in marketing, which I love. So I look after the social media for the Red Carnation Hotel Collection. We are a collection of luxury properties around the world, all very different and with incredible unique selling points. So that makes my job, you know, challenging, but equally very exciting every day.

Tom Ollerton 2:43
So yeah, so I got a birthday card this year, and it said it's never too late to become a rock star. So I cut it out and stuck on my wall. So, you know, there's, there's still time for your musical ambitions.

Molly Peel 2:53
I do think my team are quite sick of me always choosing karaoke for our Christmas party.

Tom Ollerton 2:57
What's your song?

Molly Peel 2:59
Oh, I can't answer that in 30 seconds.

Tom Ollerton 3:02
I said, one song, if you had to do it. Now, if I was like, Well, I've got the backing track here. 123, off you go. What would it be?

Molly Peel 3:09
Love on Top by Beyonce.

Tom Ollerton 3:10
Brilliant. I've obviously, yeah, we don't, yeah, if only I had the rights to play out the background anyway. Look, we got to crack on. We got some serious questions. So you've chosen a very rare question out of the questions list, and it is, how do you want your career to be remembered?

Molly Peel 3:26
I loved this question... well, because it made me really think about something that I don't think I would have ever thought about in my career unless I saw it written down so without sounding cheesy, without sounding cliche, you know, obviously you want to be remembered about, you know, by being good at what you do and sort of making an impression. But I think, you know, for what I do is obviously very creative. So to be kind of remembered as someone who is very creative yet, you know, bringing clarity into the work that we do for kind of helping to make a bit of an impact, and to, you know, reassure my teams that no idea is too big. I mean, you know, obviously you have, you know, budget blockers. You do have the case of, if they wanted to, know, fly a drone over Buckingham Palace, that might not be able to happen, but to kind of harbour an environment where people feel safe to come up with these creative ideas, and to kind of, you know, feel like they can suggest things that they've sat there and thought about, and they've got these, like, brilliantly creative ideas and to always make them feel like they can and to be remembered for, sort of shifting the perception of social media. I think, you know, when I started this for Well, I've worked in social for for a lot longer than four years. But, you know, being with Red Carnation for four years, it's like, I want people to know and for people to remember me for always kind of making it known that social media is a non negotiable for a business and a brand, and I think that's gonna, you know, get more prominent as as we kind of go on with the years. So just kind of being remembered for helping to lead that and to hopefully have some some good ideas along the way.

Tom Ollerton 5:05
Well, that is a lovely ambition. I support you on that.

Tom Ollerton 5:15
So next up, do you have a single bit of advice to help someone become a better data driven marketer?

Molly Peel 5:22
Yeah, so obviously, the industry that I work in is very focused on our guests. They are at the heart of everything that we do. It's why we do it. For loyal returning guests, or to kind of get the interest of potential new guests, young and old. So for me, a big one is to kind of treat data like a review, like feedback, like a guest review that you would see on TripAdvisor or, you know, Google reviews or something like that. And don't, don't focus so much. I think one of the things when I was starting out in social media is that, you know, I would work for agencies that would be like, right, Molly, can get you 50,000 followers in four hours? And I was sort of sat there thinking, well, if I could get you 50,000 followers in four hours, like my personal account would have hundreds and millions of 1000s of followers. But, you know, don't focus on the vanity metrics. Real value comes from understanding why the content performs in the way it does, and use those insights to kind of shape your strategies. So like, you know, what are people really like, what are they engaging with, and how can you take that information to kind of create even sharper content strategies? Another piece of advice, I would say, is sort of identify the metrics that align with your wider brand goals. So when you're putting together your marketing strategies at the beginning of the year, you know, what are you looking at from a wider perspective? And how can you take those metrics and align them with, in particular, what I do with the social strategy, let results guide and prompt creativity, rather than limit it. So I think this is, you know, if you get hit with a, you know, fat stack of KPIs at the beginning of the year, and you know, you need to hit these, it's like, don't become overwhelmed by the numbers. Use the data from previous years and think, right, what really worked well last year? And I mean, I'll talk a little bit about this in a bit more detail, but like, use previous year's data to really drive that sounds really obvious. And I don't mean for it to sound obvious, but use it to kind of shape those strategies for next year. Like, if that post worked really well, don't just think, Oh, we've done a picture of, you know, the Queen and this beautiful suite that we're at at the Rubens. It worked really well. Why did it work really well? And how can we, you know, shift that to create a similar post with a similar subject, but we know that's what our audience are engaging with. So we can, you know, take that and do it again, stay close. I think this is, you know, a really big one as well for for the hospitality industry and like, it kind of touches on the use the data as kind of a review or, you know, feedback. Stay closer to your customers than the data. It's powerful, but our interpretation of what we can take from that drives the real results. So, you know, look at how your customers are talking to you. Look at the sentiment. Don't just look at the like I said, the vanity metrics. It's all about sort of, who are you really talking to and how are they talking to you. And that's how you can really tell I think what your audience wants.

Tom Ollerton 8:22
Something you said, just struck me there, where you're talking about keeping your customers closer than the data. So how do you balance the soft qual information, data you get from customers with the hard ones and zeros that you're getting back from the platforms?

Molly Peel 8:37
Well, I think there's always going to be some kind of correlation, I would say, you know, particularly for me in my social with my social media position, it's like, at the end of the day, I'm more focused on the actual conversation that someone is leaving on our posts, or that kind of communication than I am with the this post has been shared X amount of times. I mean, I think for me, that data of that conversation within that post is more valuable to me, like I spoke about before, than any sort of vanity, vanity metrics. So that's why I always think you know when you do get those targets? And you do, you know, you have some people that say, Oh, we want, you know, 20,000 followers. And it's like, well, actually, you want to use social as a tool to really talk to the right people. And you know, you could have 2 million. This isn't just talking about this job. This is going back for other jobs. You know, you could. It's like influencers, for example, you could work with an influencer who, like, right, is 2 million followers, and you think, Oh, my God, they have 2 million followers. That's insane. That's amazing. You can work with someone else who has 5000 followers. You would rather talk to someone who has 5000 super engaged followers, who you know are getting those conversations. And I would look at those conversations. Is almost like data, especially when I'm reporting and or you could look at someone that you've worked with that has sort of 2 million followers, and you're talking to maybe 250 of those people, it's like the one with 5000 followers is a lot more valuable. So obviously, sometimes there are instances where you do need to sort of really look at those numbers and be like, right. Okay, that's, you know, especially if there's any money involved, or anything like that. But realistically, when it comes to growing our organic socials, through those, through the strategies that we execute, it's, it's the conversation, it's the community that I'm more interested in, because I think at the end of the day, if we're not talking to them correctly, then realistically, we're not going to get those numbers anyway.

Tom Ollerton 10:49
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Tom Ollerton 11:26
So we're going to move on now to your shiny new object. And what we were discussing earlier was that you were going to talk about predictive analysis, so I think I know what that means. But can you tell the listeners what predictive analysis means to you and why you've chosen that as your bright future of data driven marketing?

Molly Peel 11:46
Of course. So this is something that I think is really exciting. I think for me, predictive analysis just sort of it means, like a flurry of things. You know, it's really looking ahead, being more sort of proactive rather than reactive. I think I spend a lot of time in my position being quite reactive. And you know where that's absolutely fine. I think it's easy to get stuck in this kind of repetitive reactive loop where you sort of post, you analyse, you adjust, but realistically we can use and I touched on this before. It's like with predictive analysis, we can look at what's one, what's working in the landscape, what worked this time last year? What's working for this sort of sentiment trend, what's working for this industry trend, to predict how we can implement that in future strategies. So kind of keeping ahead to shift from reactive to proactive, like I said, and using data patterns to anticipate our next move. So I guess, with the likes of social listening, or, as I you know, prefer to call it, and I've been working with some amazing companies. Well, one amazing company on this. They love to call it social intelligence. And I love that because it is really using this, I guess, intelligent data to shape how we evolve those strategies.

Tom Ollerton 13:07
So tell me a bit more about how that social intelligence, social listening is working for you. So within a predictive analysis or analytics perspective, like, how are you going? What are you listening to? What are you listening for and then how do you process that into proactive?

Molly Peel 13:24
So I think the way in which we're using social intelligence at the moment is to not, we're not solely relying on it. I think, you know, this is a new, well it's not a new, social listening is not a new tool at all. But I think the way in which it is evolving is quite it can Well, for me, I found it, in all honesty, quite overwhelming when I was first introduced to it, I was like, you know, oh, my God, we got all these people talking about us, and I didn't even know, you know, that platform existed, or I didn't even know that we'd ever be spoken about like that on something like Reddit or something like that. You know, it's not something that was in my kind of day to day, but I think using social intelligence to sort of help identify emerging themes and sentiment shifts to help with better sort of content alignment. Again, so looking at what people are saying about us, how are people talking about us? How can we use that to our, you know, benefit, and also to see how other people are talking about our competitors, or not even within the hospitality industry. I think when you're looking at these emerging trends, it's, I don't want to stay so restricted just to our industry. I think social is such an incredibly powerful tool. And there's, if you're kind of open minded to it, and you know, I'm not always open minded. I think there's certain things that you know come out from the hospitality industry and what our competitors are doing that are great, but I think to kind of cast your net a bit wider and see how you can use that, and I think that's how we're using social intelligence is like not just keeping ourselves in a box, it's looking at the kind of complete social landscape, but also not letting. It replace the creativity. I think this is another thing that with, you know, talks on AI and how easy it is. I mean, we just had that wonderful chat about your daughter creating these beautiful pictures of a unicorn on a piece of banana bread or whatever. And that's so cool that you can easily do that. But I think one thing, especially in what I do, I never want my teams to solely rely on AI, because especially at red carnation, one of the big things that we were really proud of is the kind of authenticity and that real kind of personal connection that you get through any of our communications. So it's like, we don't really use automated responses. It's like, if you send a DM, you might, on a weekend get a holding message, you know, when the team isn't working, but you know, 90% of the time you're actually talking to a real person that is feeling all those feelings that you're feeling, can empathise with you. So I think, yeah, not letting it replace the creativity, but just to sharpen it based on the signals that we may have missed otherwise. I think it's really exciting, and the way that we're adapting, you know, predictive analysis through social intelligence is is gonna hopefully make us best hotel brand in the world, but we already are, so...

Tom Ollerton 16:24
So if someone at a brand's listening to this thinking, you know what we've we used to do social listening, or actually, we need to get on with it. You're the expert here. Like, what should people be expecting? How can they prep themselves and what's awaiting for them when they start looking into something like social intelligence.

Molly Peel 16:45
No, that's a really good question. I think the like I kind of briefly touched on earlier, it's, it can be quite overwhelming. And I think to go in with a because, you know, I'll be completely honest with you, it's like we, I had a strategy in my head of what I thought it was gonna, you know, I thought would play out. And then I had this conversation with the team that I work with with this tool, and I was thinking, Oh, my God, I did like, this is so new to me, because there's so much you can do with it. So I would, you know, if you're, if you're thinking about doing it, obviously, do a bit of research. Go in with these ideas that you what you want to get out of it. You know, look at, do some, some research and sort of sentiment trends and, and, yeah, essentially what you want to get out of it.

Tom Ollerton 17:31
So, where is this space going, right? So, predictive analysis, this time next year or in years to come where? Where's the innovation happening? What do you think is going to be possible that isn't possible now?

Molly Peel 17:47
I think it'll be really helpful when it comes to creating strategies. I mean, I think it'll be really helpful to kind of blend more data in a very, sort of interesting and an immersive way into these strategies that isn't just necessarily like, right? Here's your targets, here's your numeric targets for the year. It's like, right? What really the data that you can get from this predictive analysis and social intelligence, I think can really, really help drive some of the best strategies that you'll ever create, in terms of, you know, all types of content, whether you're looking at web content, blog content, email marketing, social content, I think the kind of information that you can get from these tools will, one, help you easily to create these strategies. It will take away a lot of the kind of admin and two, you can I think you know, you can rely on it as well. It's pulling data from previous things that are real, so you can kind of, you know, trust it in that sense, but just getting a real, sort of deeper insight into how to make your brand even better.

Tom Ollerton 18:55
So fortunately, we're at the end of the podcast now. I love this fancy room, that room with Her Majesty staring at us beyond the grave. If someone wants to get in touch with you to discuss any of the things we've talked about today, where's a good place to do that, and what makes a message that you'll respond to?

Molly Peel 19:16
LinkedIn absolutely fine. I love a LinkedIn message. I one thing I would say is I don't know if this makes me sound really loud, and I mean this in the most humble way possible, but just make sure that you know, you want to know how to spell my name. You actually are interested. I mean, I get again, I don't know who I think I am. I get so really rested, I get a lot of messages, and I sort of think you've not. And it's the same with the hotel as well. It's like, you know, slightly going off on a tangent here, but yet, so many messages from influencers who clearly don't even know the hotel that they're reaching out to to stay in. And I think, no, do your do you reset? LinkedIn? Absolutely fine. Really sales heavy messages, maybe not. I love the sort of, you know, hey, do you want have a quick call. Do you want to go for a quick coffee? I've got this really interesting idea that I want to speak to you about. Or would you be around for two minutes? I've got a quick question.

Tom Ollerton 20:06
Brilliant. That's great advice, Molly, thank you so much for your time.

Molly Peel 20:09
Thank you so much.

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