Wendy Scherer

What’s the one thing you wish you’d known when you started in social listening?

I wish I’d known the value of networking and connecting to more people in the industry. Although some of us connected at conferences or through tool vendors, deeper networking with others in the early days would have been incredibly useful from a learning and evolving perspective.

Have you had any experiences that have made you want to quit? What made you keep going?

‍It was difficult to keep going around the dotcom crash, when the business slowed to a sad drip. We kept going because we believed in what we were doing and that we had something to offer our clients, even if their budgets were currently dried up. We offered classes, resources, and advice. And when the world started to right itself again, we were here.

What role does tech play in your social intelligence process? Where do people contribute?‍

Technology is extraordinarily important in my social intelligence process, but it’s not everything. I believe it’s about how we assess the challenge, how we interrogate the data, what we do with it, and why.

I was doing this work before I had industry-specific technology and importantly, the thinking has never changed, rather, the ease of doing certain tactics has. Without technological advances, we were pulling analytics by hand and putting them in spreadsheets and creating graphs. We were pulling data and putting it in databases and coding/tagging/classifying manually. We were creating visualizations in a variety of ways. It was challenging, and has become much easier as the availability of tools has grown.

Who have you seen as a mentor in your career?‍

I’ve been fortunate to have many mentors in my career.

In leadership and character development, I am grateful to Ellen Moran who served as Executive VP/General Manager of Bozell back in the day and who still provides guidance to me in so many ways. I learned how to boldly lead from Patricia Ireland and later, Peggy Sanchez-Mills at YWCA USA, and Shelly Kramer has mentored me on business growth strategies, entrepreneurship, and agility for as long as I can remember.

In the Social Listening space, I’ve looked up to and respected Jim Reynolds; he’s always been there for me and I’ve learned so much from him. Liz Gross, CEO of Campus Sonar, and I have had regular calls for many years. Because the industry was in its infancy when I started out, my mentors were often clients, meaning that we learned and grew together.

Most embarrassing mistake you made in a social listening project - what did you learn from it?

‍Many, many years ago, a consulting firm that I’d worked for many times approached me about a quick and simple scan for one of their clients. It was a quick turnaround and a topic that I had to learn in a day. I missed the mark, as I misspelled one of the key terms in the business. The client received the report and was disappointed because the results were incomplete. Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to re-do the work.

That experience taught me that a rush job – like every project – requires 100% attention to detail. I never assume I have all the knowledge that I need, and consistently ask questions for clarity and receive confirmation before embarking on a job and I ALWAYS check spellings and include intentional misspellings as well.

How do you see the future of social listening evolving?

I expect that we will continue to see brands and clients embrace social intelligence as a discipline and that we will begin to see teams of research and analytics advocates across departments working together for greater access, collaborative studies, and shared information and insights.

Although I believe that AI will continue to affect change in our industry (like so many industries), I do feel that social intelligence practice will evolve and become more disciplined due to the deeper understanding of issues that AI can provide. While the tools will always be important, the stars in our industry who are developing strong use cases, best practices, and gaining traction will continue to be essential.

What’s the most useful data source? Are there any you find useless? Why?‍

All data sources have the potential to provide useful and insightful results. That said, the level of spam and vitriol on X concerns me in that it muddies the water and makes data validation challenging at times. Tumblr can be very useful when looking at younger audiences to understand the virality in certain topics, but it can clutter results in some work, adding volume without reach. Instagram provides rich results, as does TikTok. And I dream of finding better ways to harness LinkedIn data!

How have you been able to win over nay-sayers throughout your career?

‍I don’t know that I’ve had nay-sayers in my career. I’ve always had such passion for the work and feel that my colleagues and clients have cheered me on all the way!