If your social listening insights aren’t driving action, the issue isn’t your tools. It’s how your organization is designed to use what it hears.
That’s the uncomfortable truth behind why social care, and social listening in particular, continues to stall inside complex and regulated organizations.
Teams keep asking the wrong question: Who owns social care? When the real question is: How do we orchestrate the listening into action?
Let’s unpack why this debate won’t die, and what high-maturity organizations do differently. If you work inside a regulated, multi-team organization where social insights surface early but action comes late, this will sound familiar.
The ownership question that keeps getting organizations stuck
Here’s what usually happens.
Marketing believes social care belongs to them because it happens on social platforms. Customer experience argues it’s part of the end-to-end journey. Support teams are already responding to customers daily. Comms worries about risk and brand exposure. And leadership just wants it to work, without escalation.
Sound familiar?
This tension is most evident in regulated industries. Financial services. Healthcare. FinTech. B2B brands with compliance constraints.
When social care fails here, it’s more than frustrating. It’s risky.
But despite all the friction, ownership isn’t actually the core issue. The real breakdown happens after social listening surfaces insights.
Where social listening breaks inside regulated organizations
Most organizations don’t struggle with collecting social data. Nope. They struggle with acting on it.
- Social platforms surface patterns early.
- They detect churn signals before tickets spike.
- And capture cultural context before campaigns fall flat.
- They also hear objections long before sales does.
Yet those insights often stall. Why? Because social listening is treated like a channel responsibility instead of organizational infrastructure.
When teams debate who responds, who approves, and who reports, they miss the more important questions:
- Who interprets the signals?
- Who escalates insights across teams?
- And who turns patterns into decisions?
Without clear orchestration, insights stay trapped in dashboards.
Insight without influence is just reporting
Here’s the hard truth many teams don’t want to hear: Insight without influence becomes reporting, and reporting without action is just noise.
When insights stall, organizations don’t just miss opportunities. They absorb preventable risk, erode trust, and respond after narratives have already formed.
This is why social listening feels underwhelming in so many organizations. Not because the data lacks value, but because the people closest to the signal aren’t empowered to act.
In regulated environments, this gap is even wider. Authority is distributed across legal, compliance, risk, CX, brand, and leadership. And every layer adds friction.
The result?
Your tools detect issues early, but action often comes too late. According to Forbes, this highlights the need for teams to understand the strategic value of social listening insights rather than treating them as raw data points.
What the State of Social Care reveals about ownership models
In the State of Social Care Report 2026, four common social care ownership models show up repeatedly:
- Marketing-led
- Customer experience (CX)-led
- Support-led
- Hybrid or hub-and-spoke
Here’s the key insight. No single ownership model guarantees success. Alignment does. High-maturity organizations don’t obsess over where social listening “lives.” They design systems where insights travel.
Download The State of Social Care 2026 NOW!
What high-maturity organizations do differently
Organizations that mature past the ownership debate share a few common traits.
- First, they treat social listening as decision intelligence, not content analytics.
- Second, they distribute accountability instead of hoarding control.
- Third, they ensure insights don’t die in silos.
This is where social listening becomes so much more than monitoring. It becomes foresight. And foresight only matters if leadership listens, and acts.
Social listening as strategic intelligence, not monitoring
One of the clearest examples of this shift comes from The Hershey Company, where social listening is integrated into broader strategic planning.
Paige Walker, Manager of Cultural Intelligence and Trends, describes social listening as a way to plan for what might happen — not just what already has.
Social listening helps brands:
- Analyze how competitors handled similar situations
- Quantify whether an issue deserves attention
- Understand what consumers want before they explicitly ask
But this only works when social data has a seat at the table alongside other business intelligence. Education, advocacy, and cross-functional communication turn social listening from monitoring into maturity.
Why executive buy-in changes everything
Social listening isn’t about prettier dashboards. As we said above, it’s about foresight. And foresight only works when executive teams understand its value.
In high-maturity organizations, we consistently see:
- Shared success metrics across marketing, CX, and support
- Clear escalation paths for social listening insights
- Executive sponsorship for social intelligence
- Governance that prioritizes learning over control
This matters even more in regulated industries, where speed and safety must coexist.
When leadership supports social listening as infrastructure, teams stop fighting turf wars. And start solving problems.
Social listening is the connective tissue of the organization
At its best, social listening becomes the connective tissue between:
- Customers and leadership
- Sentiment and strategy
- What’s happening now and what’s coming next
It bridges the gaps that internal reporting never will. But only if organizations are designed to let insights move. Otherwise, social listening stays stuck at the surface.
Employ this simple audit to reveal your orchestration gap
Before reorganizing teams or investing in new tools, try this exercise.
Draw two columns. In column one, write who officially owns social care. In column two, write who customers think owns it.
Then ask yourself:
- Where do these diverge?
- What breaks when they do?
- Where does social listening actually live?
- Who is empowered to act when something goes wrong? Especially after approvals?
If insights show up but action doesn’t follow, you don’t have an ownership problem. You have an orchestration gap. And orchestration gaps don’t fix themselves without intentional design.
Pro Tip: Treat social listening like infrastructure
Stop positioning social listening as a reporting function.
Design it like infrastructure.
Infrastructure doesn’t belong to one team.
It supports the entire organization.
When social listening is treated this way, it becomes resilient — even in regulated environments.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Listening
What is social listening in customer experience? Social listening in customer experience involves monitoring and analyzing social conversations to identify sentiment, emerging issues, and unmet needs. Unlike basic monitoring, it focuses on patterns and insights that inform decisions across CX, support, marketing, and leadership.
Why does social listening fail in large organizations? It fails when insights lack influence. In large organizations, insights often stall due to unclear escalation paths, siloed teams, and governance models that prioritize control over learning and action.
How is social listening different from social monitoring? Social monitoring tracks mentions and activity. And listening interprets meaning, context, and trends. Listening focuses on why conversations happen and what they signal, not just volume or reach.
Who should own it? No single team should own social listening outright. High-maturity organizations treat it as shared infrastructure, with clear accountability for interpreting insights, escalating risks, and acting across teams.
How can teams act faster on customer signals without adding risk? Teams move faster when signals follow clear escalation paths and shared metrics. Speed doesn’t come from skipping approvals. It comes from knowing who can interpret patterns, who can decide, and when action is required. When roles are clear, responsiveness and compliance can coexist.
Listen to the episode, now:
Final takeaway: Stop asking who owns social listening
Listening tasks don’t fail because teams don’t care. They fail because organizations aren’t designed to act on what they hear.
When you stop asking who owns social listening and start designing how insights move, everything changes. All of the conversations form your strategy. And your actions follow the insight gained.
What’s one place where social listening insights get stuck inside your organization? And what would change if action moved faster? Let us know in the comments section below!
Read the Transcript
[00:00:00] The social care debate that won’t die
Insight without influence becomes reporting. And reporting without any kind of action is just noise.
So this isn’t a tool problem, it’s an organizational design problem.
Welcome to the Social Media CX Podcast. The show about what really happens when brands stop broadcasting and start having real conversations with their customers on social. I’m Brooke Sellas, and around here we believe that conversations beat campaigns every single time. This show is for leaders navigating social as a customer experience channel, especially in complex enterprise and highly regulated environments.
Let’s get into it.
[00:00:51] Why “ownership” is the wrong question
Let me start with a question that almost always creates friction inside of organizations: who owns social care? Marketing thinks it should. Customer experience thinks it has to. Support already does the work. And comms is constantly worried about the risk. And leadership? Leadership just wants it to work.
Don’t we all just want it all to work? Especially in highly regulated industries where not working doesn’t just mean a bad experience, it means risk, it means escalation. It also means reputational exposure in a very public forum.
[00:01:37] Where social care stalls inside regulated orgs
What’s interesting is that most of the tension around social care isn’t about capability.
It’s more about control. Ownership isn’t actually the problem. The lack of orchestration is what we are finding is the major problem.
As we’ve been working on the State of Social Care Report for 2026, this showed up everywhere. Not because teams are doing anything wrong, but because they’re trying to solve a systems problem with an ownership debate.
Here’s why this conversation keeps getting stuck. Most organizations still treat social care like a channel responsibility instead of cross-functional infrastructure.
That might survive at smaller scales, and it often does, but it starts to break in enterprise environments. Especially when we’re talking about financial services, FinTech, healthcare, any kind of regulated B2B brand, where response, speed, tone, escalation carry real compliance implications.
So the conversation becomes who responds, who approves, who reports? When the conversation should really sound like this: who interprets signals? Who escalates insights? And who turns these patterns and trends into action for the larger brand at scale?
[00:03:09] 4 ownership models from the State of Social Care 2026
In chapter seven of our Social Care Report, we outlined four common ownership models: marketing led, customer experience, or CX led, support led, and hybrid or hub and spoke. And here’s what the data shows very clearly, y’all. No single model guarantees success. However, alignment is more of a clear indicator of success.
[00:03:37] What high-maturity orgs get right
High maturity organizations don’t obsess over who owns social care. Instead, they design systems where social listening informs action. Teams share accountability. Insights don’t die in silos. Ugh, that one right in the heart. I hate that one. This is where social listening also comes in because it’s where most organizations quietly struggle.
Social listening teams often see issues arise first. They detect churn signals much earlier. They understand cultural context before the campaign fails. And they hear objections before sales does; way before sales does in a lot of situations. But they don’t always have authority to do anything with this information.
And in regulated organizations, that gap is often wider. Because authority is distributed across legal, compliance, risk, customer experience, and the brand.
[00:04:43] The problem with insight without influence
Insight without influence becomes reporting. Repeat that, I’m gonna repeat it for you. Insight without influence becomes reporting. And reporting without any kind of action is just noise.
So this isn’t a tool problem, it’s an organizational design problem. I would say it’s not even a team problem. This is exactly why social care stalls even when someone owns it, because the people closest to the signal aren’t always closest to the decision. Too many layers, right? This challenge isn’t theoretical.
Even highly mature enterprise sized brands have had to intentionally design for social care. This is where I want to bring in a voice that I deeply respect. She’s been on this show before, so if you haven’t listened to Paige Walker’s episode on social listening, make sure you go do that after this.
Paige Walker is a bombshell. She’s the manager of cultural intelligence and trends at the Hershey Company. Yes, Hershey candy, the one we all love, and she works at the intersection of social listening, AI and cross-functional insight. And her perspective perfectly captures what mature organizations understand.
Here’s how she put it in our report. "Social listening can support strategy, helping a brand plan for what might happen in the future, but hasn’t happened yet. It lets you analyze how competitors may have handled a situation and takes learnings from it. Social listening can also help you quantify an issue, letting a brand know whether it’s something to be concerned about or not worthy of any attention."
She goes on to say, "your consumers are telling you what they want and it’s all on social media. Tapping into conversations about your brand and category or competitors can provide key insights into what your consumers are looking for. Leaders need to take social media data more seriously and give it a seat at the table with other forms of data.
Communication is key. Figure out what business questions other teams are looking to answer and find ways that your data, your social listening data can help answer them. Education and advocacy are also essential. You are the expert in social media data."
Paige basically just summed up the difference between monitoring, which is what a lot of people deal with social listening or think they’re doing, and maturity.
[00:07:22] How executive buy-in and shared metrics change everything
Social listening isn’t about the pretty dashboards. And I know they’re pretty, we can get stuck in them for a long time. But really it’s more about foresight. And foresight only matters if leadership is willing to listen, number one. But number two, a very close second, is act. That is the shift we’re calling for in our State of Social Care Report.
We want you to stop asking who owns social care and start asking: How do we orchestrate this? In higher maturity organizations, we constantly see these things. Shared success metrics across marketing, cx, customer experience, and support. A lot of times that even goes into product or brand. We see clear escalation paths for social insights. Meaning listening, but also acting on, the insights that we receive.
We see executive sponsorship for social intelligence. Executive teams are bought in. They know how important it is from the top down. Governance that prioritizes learning and not control. This is especially true in industries that are highly regulated. It’s hard to get around all of that control, those compliance and risks.
But when you prioritize learning, it gets better. Social care when all of that is happening, becomes infrastructure and not turf. And definitely not living in a silo.
And in regulated organizations, this shift is what allows speed and safety to coexist with one another.
[00:08:57] The connective tissue of social care
Social listening becomes the connective tissue between customers and leadership. Between sentiment, the feeling of those customers, and the strategy of the brand. Between what’s happening now in this moment and what’s coming next.
[00:09:15] A 2-column audit to uncover your orchestration gap
Before you download anything… but I really do want you to download the State of Social Care report.
But before you do that, and before you think about restructuring your team, I want you to do one simple exercise. Draw out two columns, get a piece of paper, just two columns, easy peasy. And in column one, write who officially owns social care. Okay. And then in column two, I want you to put WHO customers think owns it.
And then I want you to ask yourself these questions. Where do these two things diverge? What breaks, if they do diverge? Where does social listening actually live in this picture? And one more question, especially if you operate in a regulated industry, when something goes wrong on social, who is empowered to act in the moment, after approval cycles? If insight is showing up, but action isn’t? You don’t have an ownership problem. You have an orchestration gap. And that’s where I think a lot of you will find that you sit.
Over the last four episodes, we’ve talked about:
-why the old social care and social media model is broken
-how trust shows up way before the sale
-why automation must amplify empathy
-and why ownership without orchestration stalls your progress.
All of this is unpacked inside of the State of Social Care Report 2026, which I strongly, highly, very much, recommend you download. The links are in the show notes, which if you’re listening are on YouTube where you can watch the episode and get the show transcript under the video.
Or you can visit http://bsquared.media/the-state-of-social-care-2026. So the state of Social Care 2026. Pop in those dashes in between the words.
As always, if this show is helping you think differently about social media, social care, customer experience on social, customer support on social, please rate and review us at ratethispodcast.com/smcx That’s S as in social, M as in media, C as in customer, and X as in x-ray. Even though we know CX means customer experience.
When you rate and review us, it totally makes my day, obviously, but it also helps us get in front of more brilliant voices and keeps our community growing with intention.
Until next time, think conversation, not campaign.
Brooke Sellas: Thanks for tuning in to the Social Media CX podcast. If you loved today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who needs to up their social care game.