The science of signs: How the experts find meaning in social data.

Welcome to Insights Experts, our interview series where we catch up with the brightest minds in social intelligence and beyond, to find out what they’re doing with social data and how we can deepen our practice.

For this first episode, we caught up with semiotician and cultural strategist Dominika Noworolska.

Brand messaging runs deep.

Semiotics is the study of signs and meaning. That means anything that communicates something, big or small. So that’s concepts and narratives, ideals, histories. The good and the bad. Not just emojis. Dominika introduces the complexities of brand meaning and what that means for brand purpose and strategy, especially culture.

‘Social data is where culture lives’.

How can brands stay culturally relevant? What should go into brand strategy decisions? What are the messages coming through your brand online that you can’t see? Social data is a huge part of answering these questions, but it's not the whole answer.

There’s more to see in visual data.

Visuals are tricky. Social is visually heavy but we often ignore it as it’s hard to get the insights out of this data. We had our eyes opened here around a topic we know lots of practitioners have been mulling over recently - visual data analysis. She also demonstrates the process of interpretation with a great example.

This is about brand health, purpose, visual analysis, data sourcing and cultural insights.

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