How to get buy-in for social intelligence across your organisation

With the insights that you can extract from digital data, the business impact of this type of data is significant. However, making the most of digital data requires extensive planning and iteration. Not to mention support from the broader business, particularly leadership. And the best way to get support is by providing results that show the value it brings.

At the 2022 Observe Summit Aaron Bernstein, Insights & Brand Reputation Management at Walmart; Justin Schoen, Social Intelligence & Insights Leader at Microsoft; and Tara Beard-Knowland, Marketing Effectiveness and Insights & Analytics Innovation Director at GSK discussed this topic in-depth with Taylor Dickson, Analytics Architect at Brandwatch.

‍

The challenges of getting organisational buy-in

If you have leadership that already understands the value of digital data, like Microsoft did, it’s a little less challenging to start off your journey. However, the journey still isn’t always smooth and easy.

Three to five years ago, when social listening was still fairly new, there was a general lack of awareness that made it challenging to incorporate into an organisation. There were instances where workers felt threatened because it seemed like an attempt to automate their job. And it involved bringing in new metrics, new measurement capability, and new ways of understanding the world to a place where people were used to doing things a certain way.

“It’s natural for anyone to not necessarily embrace that instantaneously,” explained Aaron. It took time to build a level of understanding and empathy, and that’s exactly where there was a need to bring in a human element.

“It can be a really time-consuming thing, requiring a lot of hands-on support,” agreed Tara.

Picking the right tech

One obstacle that organisations face when starting to analyse digital data is choosing the right tools and building a tech stack that will truly add value to their business. This largely depends on the specific organisational needs, what kind of data is needed and how data is going to be used.

“We work very much on agile principles,” explained Tara. “We think about that initial discovery of what our users want to understand and do, so we feel like if we’ve got a good foundational understanding of what our stakeholders want and need, then we’re in a much better place to be able to make that choice and we can use that as a bit of a North Star as we move through,” she elaborated.

The biggest thing for Microsoft is how to get from data to insight. “What can unlock that most efficiently for us? And it just happens to be that we have a platform internally that a lot of marketers and teams use, so it’s a natural tie-in for us,” explained Justin.

Proving the value of digital data

The best way to get organisational buy-in for a social intelligence function is by proving the business value social data brings. The metrics and approaches for doing this are different for each organisation.

Justin explained that it started off a bit rudimentary for the Microsoft team, basically getting the insights to be leveraged. “Now we’ve set KPIs to help us understand what executives are leveraging,” he explained. “So while we started very very localised, we’ve slowly started to grow and think much larger, because of our information…but every now and then we’ll get a ‘What’s the sentiment of this?’ And so that’s kind of our cue to know that we have to jump in.”

“For us, I think it’s just demand growth,” explained Aaron. “Are more people in the organisation coming to you and asking questions and wanting information? For us, that’s scaled up all the way to the executive level to the CEO level, where they’re asking questions and we’re harnessing open-source data to answer. They’re valuing that data in the same way that they would other sorts of more traditional data collection methods.”