Building an Integrated Social Media Team

Before TGI Fridays had an in-house social media team, the brand was missing chances to retain guests, spot crisis issues and address guest feedback. Social inbound held product, store and quality signals that teams outside marketing, including the field, needed. As founding Social Media Lead of the brand's first in-house social team, I led 3 social media professionals alongside 25+ social instigators in the field, and collaborated with about 15 stakeholders across teams, departments and agencies. I prioritized systematizing community management, review management and the flow of social insight to operational teams, to strengthen the brand and support operational improvements.

I set up detailed automated tagging and categorization of inbound messages in Sprinklr's rules engine, so the social team could quickly assess what came in. I configured automated reports tailored to other business units, so they could research the conversations and recurring themes that mattered to them. Qualitative insight went to operations, field marketing, beverage innovation, culinary and L&D, and helped the brand's marketing and PR agencies validate brand partner collaborations. Every decision served one aim: getting guest feedback to the team that could act on it.

Tagging and reporting surfaced a trend of below-average guest experiences tied to a limited-time offer (LTO) and identified the locations that needed training.

• I engaged 3 Field Marketing Directors to address LTO fulfillment directly with locations that were applying different fulfillment rules.
• The L&D team ran 5 regional training sprints.
• Comparing the two weeks after launch with the two weeks after outreach and training, positive sentiment on LTO fulfillment rose 6 percentage points, and fulfillment complaints from struggling locations declined.

Together, this strengthened a program that was a primary contributor to the brand's annual store traffic objective.

Stays a rule. Tagging would still run on a rules engine: writing the rules kept my team close to the terms that decided where each tag landed, and quarterly audits kept the output reliable. Real-time alerts by location, franchise group and LTO menu item or service, with the verbatim post attached, would be rules too.

Goes to AI. Reading sentiment with more nuance than the scoring available then, catching posts about the LTO that never name the menu item, and drafting cross-functional reports that position social insight as a leading indicator of quarterly net promoter score, the executive benchmark.

Stays human. The feedback loop with report recipients on what they're tracking, and a person's review of every report before it's distributed, following my Always Intervene Meaningfully approach.