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The AI Social Playbook

AI Social Listening: Find the Buyer Objections in Your Comments

Sep 7, 2026
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Your listening tool counts mentions and stops there, so a month of comments arrives as a pile nobody has time to read. Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media, shares her screen and runs 1,902 of them through Claude to find the complaints that are actually costing the brand money.

What you will take away

A negative sentiment score cannot tell a pricing objection from a shipping delay or a rude support reply.

Claude trimmed 1,902 incoming messages to 1,829 real conversations by stripping spam unprompted.

The biggest theme, odor at 249 mentions, split 49% positive against 40% negative, so it is a coin flip.

Ranking by one-sidedness lifted dust to second on 66 negative mentions, since 55% of dust mentions are negative.

The discount double-check makes Claude show verbatim comments and row locations alongside its summary.

The FAQ pass returned a ranked question list matched to formats, including a competitor comparison page.

Chapters

00:00 Manual listening reports miss the real questions

00:51 Social listening by hand, one spreadsheet row at a time

02:21 Why a negative score hides four different problems

03:26 Conversation is home turf for a language model

05:07 Pulling one month of conversations out of your inbox

06:09 The context block that goes in before the instruction

07:45 What counts as a meaningful sample

09:08 1,902 messages in, 1,829 after the spam is gone

09:50 The biggest theme is a coin flip

11:05 Start with the objections, not the 82% praise

12:19 Ranking by one-sidedness instead of theme size

14:17 The discount double-check

15:29 Put the citation request in the first prompt

16:02 The what we heard loop with clients

17:39 Answering the question where it was asked

19:05 The FAQ list and the competitor comparison page

20:57 Why she skipped her Claude project

22:01 Three ways a first run goes wrong

24:12 Six months of hand-coding down to a couple of hours

26:08 Where to find Brooke

About our guest

Brooke Sellas is CEO of B Squared Media, a social experience management firm that runs social care for brands including Brother International, Miele, and BCU. She wrote Conversations That Connect, teaches social care through UCI and LinkedIn Learning, and was doing conversational analysis by hand long before software existed for it.

Website: bsquared.media

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brookebsellas

YouTube: youtube.com/c/hellobsquared

Full episode, prompts, and transcript

https://www.agorapulse.com/blog/podcasts/ai-social-playbook/e1

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