Duolingo’s Masterminded Social Listening Ways

Katherine Chan is Duolingo’s international head of social media, accountable for the outrageous social media stunts that make Duolingo a family identify, and construct model affinity for its mischievous inexperienced owl mascot, Duo.

On Tuesday, April 9, from 2:25 to 2:50 PM EDT, Chan will seem on a Predominant Stage panel at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week occasion in New York. Lindsay Kennedy, vice chairman of shopper service on the company DEPT, will be a part of Chan and ADWEEK govt editor Jameson Fleming on stage to debate social listening ways, and utilizing them to keep up cultural relevance. Chan’s newest standout work for Duolingo features a five-second regional Tremendous Bowl spot through which Duo’s derriere explodes to the acquainted Duolingo chime, revealing one other inexperienced owl appended to Duo’s bottom; and Duolingo on Ice, an April Idiot’s Day social media spoof on over-the-top leisure like Disney On Ice.

Forward of Chan’s Social Media Week session, take a look at ADWEEK’s interview together with her. She digs into her maniacal marketing campaign technique and what social listening has to do with it.

This interview has been calmly edited for size and readability.

Are you able to tease what you’ll speak about on stage subsequent week?

I’m enthusiastic about this matter. It’s fairly core to what Duolingo does. We name our entire advertising and marketing technique, very a lot, social-first. That signifies that we’re listening to our neighborhood, and focusing plenty of our greatest funding campaigns on what we all know resonates with our viewers and constructing the lore of our model, which is one thing that we create with our followers. One factor that’s distinctive about Duo, our mascot character that folks know, love and worry, is that he began, not less than by way of our model, as a meme that our learners made.

We have been recognized years in the past for our notification technique of Duo reminding you to do your day by day classes. Folks took this [concept] and ran with it on the web. Now we’ve made {that a} fairly core a part of our character, and that already began with social listening.

I additionally am wanting ahead to speaking about a few of our larger campaigns and the way these drew from social insights. One latest one [was] our Tremendous Bowl spot, which was a five-second spot of Duo farting out himself. That got here from an perception that we noticed with our widgets. So we’ve a widget you’ll be able to set up in your telephone the place the photographs of Duo shuffle by and remind you to do your lesson all through the day. One of many pictures that went probably the most viral on social was a picture of Duo popping out of Duo. It began with the widget picture.