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Katherine Chan is Duolingo’s global head of social media, responsible for the outrageous social media stunts that make Duolingo a household name, and build brand affinity for its mischievous green owl mascot, Duo.
On Tuesday, April 9, from 2:25 to 2:50 PM EDT, Chan will appear on a Main Stage panel at ADWEEK’s Social Media Week event in New York. Lindsay Kennedy, vice president of client service at the agency DEPT, will join Chan and ADWEEK executive editor Jameson Fleming on stage to discuss social listening tactics, and using them to maintain cultural relevance. Chan’s latest standout work for Duolingo includes a five-second regional Super Bowl spot in which Duo’s derriere explodes to the familiar Duolingo chime, revealing another green owl appended to Duo’s backside; and Duolingo on Ice, an April Fool’s Day social media spoof on over-the-top entertainment like Disney On Ice.
Ahead of Chan’s Social Media Week session, check out ADWEEK’s interview with her. She digs into her maniacal campaign strategy and what social listening has to do with it.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Can you tease what you’ll talk about on stage next week?
I’m excited about this topic. It’s pretty core to what Duolingo does. We call our whole marketing strategy, very much, social-first. That means that we’re listening to our community, and focusing a lot of our biggest investment campaigns on what we know resonates with our audience and building the lore of our brand, which is something that we create with our fans. One thing that is unique about Duo, our mascot character that people know, love and fear, is that he started, at least in terms of our brand, as a meme that our learners made.
We were known years ago for our notification strategy of Duo reminding you to do your daily lessons. People took this [concept] and ran with it on the internet. Now we’ve made that a pretty core part of our personality, and that already started with social listening.
I also am looking forward to talking about some of our bigger campaigns and how those drew from social insights. One recent one [was] our Super Bowl spot, which was a five-second spot of Duo farting out himself. That came from an insight that we saw with our widgets. So we have a widget you can install on your phone where the images of Duo shuffle through and remind you to do your lesson throughout the day. One of the images that went the most viral on social was an image of Duo coming out of Duo. It started with the widget image.
