Research Operations

Best-selling author James Clear once Tweeted: “The two skills of modern business are storytelling and spreadsheets. Know the numbers. Craft the narrative.” To help my organization grow as storytellers, I developed two workshops: one that focused on telling a great story based on data and another on delivering a compelling story to senior audiences. I was asked to teach these data-driven storytelling workshops as part of new hire orientation for new researchers; marketers and sellers would frequently ask to join. I’ve also taught a version of this workshop to the Advertising Research Foundation members.

The Advertising Research team at Twitter did more than measure; we equipped global sellers with access to top-tier third-party research tools, ensuring swift and thorough responses to client questions. To help ease inbound questions about when and how to use the various SaaS tools at their disposal, I led the creation of "Pre-Sales Insights for Account Managers,” a global sales training initiative aimed at boosting seller efficiency. This program enhanced understanding and utilization of first- and third-party scaled research tools, including Brandwatch, Comscore MyMetrix, GWI, and YouGov. It focused on how to choose the best on-demand methodology for the advertiser question at hand.

As organizations—and their repository of insights—scale, research and findings can lose their context and be shared in unintentionally confusing, conflicting, or even misleading ways. To ensure that the global sales and marketing organization understood the right way to share Twitter’s knowledge with clients and partners, I created a Citations guide alongside my partner in Marketing Legal. This guide walked employees through the different types of research methodologies and how to cite them (some examples: eMarketer statistics are often aggregated from other sources which need to be noted; insights from SaaS tools need to be cited in a way that shows how to replicate the statistic, and the organization must disclose when research was specifically commissioned by the company.) This guide made it notably easier for employees to share the company’s valuable knowledge, and significantly streamlined the legal review process for externally-facing materials.

The advertising research team at Twitter was responsible for funding and managing the global sales and marketing team’s access to SaaS insights tools like Comscore, GWI, and YouGov. As my team’s operational lead, I managed our external relationship with these vendors, represented the function in contract discussions, designed vendor management agendas, and led implementation and education efforts as new capabilities became available.

One of the most strategic and complex SaaS partnerships I led was with Brandwatch, which captured and indexed Twitter’s “Firehose.” This tool allowed 1000+ sellers to count and analyze conversations about their clients quickly; the data was used in RFP, QBR, Upfront presentations, and campaign recap reports worldwide. As part of my vendor management responsibilities, I created and managed a “follow-the-sun” internal support model, where a global team of internal analysts monitored the tool’s uptime and performance, addressed urgent issues, and collected product feedback. I also directed and supervised the global “Brandwatch Action Plan,” a program to hold the vendor accountable for delivering agreed-upon enablement services and product improvements. As part of this plan, I delivered key tool enhancements for Twitter, including improved in-region and in-language support and expanded access to real-time social listening data.

Overseeing this partnership was particularly complex: while Brandwatch served as a vendor to Twitter’s advertising sales and B2B marketing teams, the vendor’s consumption and storage of Twitter’s “Firehose” made them one of Twitter Data’s most important clients. Managing this relationship on my team’s behalf required building relationships with multiple internal organizations and then framing the vendor’s understanding of the company’s priorities in a way that best-supported revenue growth.