SI Insider 50: Tips and advice from 2022's winners

The global social intelligence community is still fairly small and we, here at The SI Lab, think it’s important to promote the great work everyone is doing - to highlight those who are leading the charge in advocating for social data as a valuable source of insight. That’s why we launched the Social Intelligence Insider 50 in 2022.

As we prepare for the 2023 SI Insider 50, we thought we’d share what some of our winners are doing with social data, and how they see the discipline of social intelligence evolving in future.

How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?

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Christopher Chen, Executive Director, Global Social Intelligence at Warner Bros  

Christopher Chen, Executive Director, Global Social Intelligence at Warner Bros (CC): Social data is seen as an important aspect in business decision-making at WarnerMedia. My team is engaged with utilizing social data to support multiple divisions and functions of the company:  corporate communications teams to understand any issues that may arise for any of our properties and content, marketing teams to understand activation opportunities and strategies that would have the most impact at driving interest and intent to consume, partnership teams to understand brands and influencers that would be most effective at reaching relevant audiences, and development teams to find opportunities to create new content.

Melissa Davies, Senior Manager, Brand Health & Creative Excellence at Mondelēz International (MD): For CPG companies overall, understanding and connecting to our consumers as humans has never been more important. Social data gives us a window to build that human understanding by hearing directly what our consumers are thinking and feeling. At Mondelez, we have used social intelligence to support creative development, campaign briefing, and innovation – and looking ahead, we want to push further in the areas of real-time brand health measures and trend-spotting.

Adam Mills,  Marketing Strategy & Planning Lead at BT Group (AM): Our social insight and intelligence capability has really come into its own over the past year or so – we’ve been able to step it up from reactive reporting to proactive, strategic insight that supports and augments how we deliver the voice of the customer to our senior leaders and decision makers. I can’t go into too much detail on what we actually do (that age-old chestnut!), but we’re now looking to take traditional support methods (reporting, analysis etc) to the next level, and input the learnings from our social data and analysis directly into our data and decision-making toolset. We’re really excited by what this can do for us, especially as it starts to develop a whole new way of democratising this data and delivering instant recommendations on approach.

As we scaled our operation, we made the decision pretty early on that the best way to deliver true value from our social insight was to ensure it fitted neatly in with some of the more ‘traditional’ research and data collection methods, and that it supported existing methodologies. This way, we can deliver strong, robust and reliable recommendations and messaging to our stakeholders that goes above and beyond what people post online about their experiences. It’s something I’ve spoken about before, but I think it’s really important that we tell rich stories with this data in conjunction with other research and data sources – treating social data in isolation keeps it out of the loop, and if we want to truly deliver value from newer data sources such as social, we need to stitch it all together into one succinct narrative.

What’s your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?

CC: The great thing about social intelligence is that the fields of traditional quantitative and qualitative research has already broken down many of the barriers for organizational buy-in.  Social intelligence allows organizations to receive real-time information from digital engagement as well as near-real time quantification of qualitative social listening to understand what makes our consumers tick.  The data that comes from our work in social intelligence is not stand-alone as well – our results can feed into providing an informed and data-backed foundation for quantitative and qualitative studies that can dive further into aspects where social intelligence has its limitations.

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Melissa Davies, Senior Manager, Brand Health & Creative Excellence at Mondelēz International

MD: To drive buy-in, I ask people to think about their own behavior as a consumer and how they use social media for entertainment and information across nearly all aspects of their lives. As marketers, if we ignore that rich source of insight, what are we missing? It’s very gratifying to see that “a-ha” moment when a stakeholder realizes the value of social intelligence in understanding our consumers, even if that realization sometimes happens one stakeholder at a time.

AM: There’s two things I’d suggest here: map out where you think the teams who could gain the most value out of social intelligence and find yourself some champions within those functions. It’s now an exercise that our social intelligence team goes through once a quarter (especially as we scale), but in the early days, we looked very specifically at where we thought the most interesting case studies would be. This all helped us deliver a business case back to the teams to show what value could be derived from the toolsets and the data we had, and the champions were tantamount to the success of that side of our programme.

The other thing I’d strongly suggest is to ensure social intelligence never feels like Pandora’s Box – bring it into the fold and augment existing reporting and analysis with small pockets of social data. The more comfortable your business feels seeing social data and social metrics, the more likely they are to understand what they add to the story. When we started out on delivering our social intelligence programme at BT Group, we started to add really high-level social analysis into our NPS reporting, which just started to give a flavour as to what was being said and felt outside of our direct contact with our customers. These small nudges all build a better understanding as to what social could really deliver to our business.

Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?

CC: Social intelligence is a rather new field of consumer intelligence, and I think companies are still wrangling at what is the best way to engage and use this new source of information.  Social intelligence leaders should have a seat at the decision-making table, where ideas are still being formulated, rather than being engaged after the ideas have already been decided upon.  By being part of idea generation, leaders can understand what consumers truly desire and identify pitfalls to avoid.

MD: AI hasn’t reached the level of accuracy where it can replace a human analyst (thankfully!), but I would like to see additional application of AI in social intelligence to speed the process of making sense of such a vast set of unstructured data. In particular, using AI to help uncover emerging/diverging themes and make connections between different topics frees up valuable analyst time to focus on the insight and business implication. I would also like to see insights professionals weaving social intelligence together with other research sources to build a clearer overall picture and a better/faster understanding of what is important to our consumers and stakeholders.

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Adam Mills,  Marketing Strategy & Planning Lead at BT Group

AM: I’d like to see the stigma around social intelligence disappear in its entirety – we all know the value that data can bring organisations across every sector, yet there’s still some that poo-poo social insight. If we want to understand our existing audiences, let alone the next generation to come, and see and understand the wider behavioural, societal and cultural shifts our businesses are going to have to face up to in the coming years, we need to feel comfortable learning from them on the platforms that they choose, not just the ones we put in front of them.

I’d also like to see the social networks themselves realise that they can help continue to grow this industry by allowing better access to data via accredited platforms. We’ve all faced the issues of walled gardens and data degradation, but from a reporting and analysis perspective, this only creates more doubt with our stakeholders. If we’re serious about utilising the vast amounts of data that’s captured on a daily basis for societal good, then we need to be able to access this in a clear and consistent way.

What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?

CC: The whole point of social intelligence is the power of understanding the digital consumer.  While likes, comment counts, and shares are straight forward, understanding the verbatims and what the consumer means when they are commenting is nuanced.  Having a pulse on the latest trends, memes, and news is extremely important so that when you report on the voice of the consumer, you can help provide the context in which the consumer is coming from.  At the end of the day, the teams that are looking for information don’t know what to pay attention to in the mess that is social media.  Social intelligence teams should strive to distill this down so that stakeholders understand what is most important and why they need to act upon this information.  A good social intelligence report can showcase its value through the story that it tells, not just by relaying the numbers.

MD: Social intelligence won’t be the right solution for every possible research question, and it’s worth spending time to make sure you’re matching the right approach for your business need to really get value. Social intelligence isn’t a magical “insight button” (as much as we might wish for one!)

AM: Feel comfortable when things fail – you’re not going to always get it right, especially whilst social intelligence is still a relatively ‘new’ concept to those outside of our industry. Stakeholders will ask awkward questions, they’ll challenge your data and there will be times when it feels like things aren’;t going your way – don’t give up. This is the exact time to start ramping up!

The beauty of having networks like the SI Lab is that you can speak to people who have almost certainly been in your shoes and in your exact situation, too – don’t be scared to reach out to them. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learnt from others in the industry: some who have already scaled their operation; some who are yet to even kickstart. We’re all fighting the good fight, and I think it’s really important we keep learning from each other to ensure social intelligence becomes and remains a core part of analysis in every organisation.

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