At this year’s Coachella, nine YouTube livestreams ran simultaneously for 14 hours a day. Behind the scenes, five to nine human moderators covered each stream at any given moment, working across multiple languages to keep the live chats usable, safe, and commercially viable.

For most viewers, the operation was invisible. For Social Factor, the Dallas-based social operations agency that supported the activation, that invisibility is the point: brands are spending heavily on content, livestreams, and creator-led programming while leaving the audience layer under-managed.

Social Factor, founded in 2011, was originally built to give mid-sized regional brands fractional social media support. The company has since scaled into enterprise territory, managing community operations for some of the world’s largest consumer platforms, automotive manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and consumer goods brands. Kate Grigal, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Solutions, has been at the company for more than eight years. Jason Gray joined as Director of Marketing in early 2026.

The two operate at different ends of the pitch: Jason works on visibility and growth; Kate builds the operational structures that clients do not think to ask for until something goes wrong. Together, they make a consistent argument: brands spend enormous resources on content creation and live programming, then leave the community layer as an afterthought.

“Your job is to create this experience,” Kate says. “Our job is to protect it.”

The Gap Between Content and Operations

Jason frames the problem in practical terms. Brands chase viral moments, he says, often without thinking about what comes next.

“When you do get that viral content, do you have the team to support it?” he asks. “A lot of people put a lot of money into the creative aspect of things, but don’t always think about the social operations side.”

That gap was the original problem Social Factor’s founders set out to address. In the early years, Kate says, clients were mostly regional companies that needed social media presence but could not justify full-time social staff. As the company moved into enterprise accounts, the problem shifted in scale, but not in nature.

Kate traces that dynamic to a constraint most brands share: “Companies are looking at operational and financial efficiencies, often struggling to fund a team large enough to handle the 24/7 nature of social media,” she says. “They still have to be responsible for the care and feeding of the communities and the content. Partnering with an agency like Social Factor still plays out because we can meet them where they need to.” 

The Human Question

Social Factor operates in a market racing toward automation, and Kate does not pretend that the pressure is not real. Her answer is not to reject AI but to define the limits of what it can replace.

“AI does not replace common sense,” she says. “It does not always pick up on nuance. It’s only as good as the time that it was trained.”

The company uses automation for triage, pulling the highest-priority items to the front of moderators’ queues. Under tight service-level agreements, some clients require flagged content to be identified and escalated within 15 minutes. That speed depends on technology, Kate says, but the judgment call at the end of the chain has to come from a person.

“If you leave crisis monitoring or risk mitigation exclusively to automation, nuance and context is missed, period,” she says.

The trust dimension matters as much as the accuracy one. Kate points to a growing audience suspicion about whether interactions online are human or automated. “People are getting increasingly concerned and suspicious about, am I talking to a person, am I talking to AI?” she says. “You want to address the need of the person coming in, rather than trying to convince them that you’re a person.”

Jason puts it more directly. “What is the point of social media? It is to be social.”

Nine Streams, Nine Conversations

The Coachella work is Social Factor’s most detailed proof point. This year’s activation involved nine simultaneous YouTube streams, each tied to a specific stage, with multiple moderators working in parallel across languages for the duration of the event. The team briefs daily before each activation, reviewing upcoming performers, tracking trending phrases on other platforms, and identifying what Kate calls “spicy participants” who might generate disruption. What circulates as a joke in the United States, she notes, reads differently in Brazil or Spain.

“We want the music and the artist to be in the forefront,” Kate says. “We don’t want there to be distractions that take away from the experience.”

Source: @barstoolsports

The operation has been refined over five consecutive years of Coachella work. The first year, Kate says, the hardest challenge was the unknown: predicting when chats would surge and which language communities would show up in force. The calibration has improved, but surprises still happen.

“I wish my crystal ball were a little bit clearer,” she says. “Who knew that this particular Brazilian artist was going to bring in so many fans from India?”

Social Factor also supports polls, pins, trivia, and merchandise activations within the streams, tying community management to commercial outcomes in real time.

No Such Thing as Set It and Forget It

The same logic that applies to live events, Kate argues, applies to social commerce and paid advertising, an area she says brands consistently underestimate.

Brands running automated catalog campaigns or paid social ads often manage the ad spend carefully and ignore the comment section entirely. That combination creates compounding risk.

“A handful of comments could tank an entire campaign because nobody’s paying attention to it,” Kate says. “You might have people asking questions about making a purchase. You want to be able to answer those questions right away.”

The broader failure mode is what she describes as siloing: agencies handling creative, media, community management, and paid performance never talking to each other, so no one has a complete picture of what is happening across a campaign.

“Bringing all of those parties together and making sure that we’re all counting things the same, that we’re all measuring success or failures in the same way,” she says, is where social operations creates real value. “Once everybody understands a full view of what’s happening, you have a higher opportunity for success.”

Platform Fluency Is Not a Template

Social Factor’s cross-platform work requires more than operational scale, Kate says. It requires genuine cultural knowledge of each environment and a willingness to build playbooks that go below the platform level to the creator level.

“We have certain things that we do on Instagram that’s different from TikTok versus Facebook versus LinkedIn versus YouTube,” Kate says. “But then it also goes down a level where you really start to create something customized for the creator themselves.”

She points to one activation where a YouTube event featured TikTok-native creators. The audience arriving for that stream brought different behavioral patterns, different vocabulary, and different expectations than a native YouTube audience. “We had to do a really deep dive prep to understand the culture, the demographics of the TikTok audience that were coming to play on YouTube,” Kate says. “It is a very different environment.”

Jason frames the platform question in strategic terms. Brands that post everywhere by default often waste resources chasing audiences that are not there. “There are a lot of brands out there that still post on X to this day, and they get no interactions,” he says. “Why are we even here? Let’s go to where our audience is.”

The World Cup Is Next

The FIFA World Cup is Social Factor’s next major target, and Kate is already deep in preparation. The event represents a particular combination of scale, passion, and multilingual complexity that she says requires planning that would take most brands months to prepare.

Her baseline recommendation for any World Cup activation: English, Spanish, and Portuguese coverage as a minimum, with EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) and APAC (Asia & Pacific) languages added based on specific matchups and audience composition. The challenge is not just volume, she says, but the intensity of soccer fan communities, which require a different posture than entertainment livestreams.

Looking further out, both Kate and Jason describe a social operations market that will grow more specialized rather than more automated. Brands will face audiences fragmented across more platforms, including what Jason calls “dark social” environments like Discord, where community behavior is harder to monitor, and metrics are less standardized.

“Social operations is really going to start to become a little bit more nuanced and per platform,” Jason says. “Social Factor is going to fit in by being on every different platform and understanding the audience within it.”

As AI continues to permeate social environments, Kate argues, the case for human presence in community management will become easier to make, not harder.

“People will lose trust in a brand (fully represented by AI), and they will lose trust in the platforms,” she says. “I think we’re seeing it in certain places. People don’t know what’s real anymore. That is something I will always advocate against.”

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