What does social intelligence mean to you?
Social intelligence to me is being constantly plugged into consumer experiences with the ability to not only monitor trends but also forecast. It’s an opportunity for active listening, practicing empathy, and understanding people in an environment they choose to engage with.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
Communication skills are really important in order to not only share social intelligence findings in a way best suited to your intended audience, but to also spread awareness of the approach.
Curiosity is important in almost everything anyone does - it’s a core motivating factor for wanting to understand the world around us. As such, curiosity is the first step in recognizing there’s something we don’t know and wanting to understand why knowing the unknown is beneficial. Then curiosity comes in again when we go searching for an answer, and curiosity is critical as we analyze the results (you can’t go into a project thinking you already know the answer). We have to continuously be asking questions of others, ourselves, and the data throughout the process.
Adaptability is undoubtedly one of the most necessary skills in social listening. Unlike traditional research methods where you get to write the survey questions or build the interview protocol to directly align with your objectives, in social listening you are relying on what’s already out in the world. What are people talking about and what does it mean for you and your research?
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
Overall understanding related to social intelligence is a challenge for adoption. You either have brands who don’t want to adopt social intelligence because they don’t believe in its efficacy or brands that don’t resource it well enough for full adoption.
Brands that don’t believe in the efficacy may feel like “online” is an artificial space and skewed more negative than positive–that bias is difficult for them to overcome because social listening is new. The biases present in other research methods have been explored, acknowledged, and accepted partially due to longevity. There’s also a lot of privacy issues or source limitations that make brands uncomfortable that they’d be able to see the “full story” of their brand online.
There are also brands that under resource social intelligence, whether that’s having too few people do it or they don’t invest in really good social listening platforms. This is a limitation to full adoption because the true magic of social listening comes out when you have someone with the resources who can really dig into what’s happening with your brand and reveal insights you weren’t aware of. That builds trust.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
I can only pick one?!?! How about two?
I really enjoy using social intelligence in mixed methods research work. It often provides preliminary insights that can feed into a better designed interview protocol or survey, which guarantees I’m getting data a Fetch team can take action on. Plus, the participant is participating in targeted research with no fluff. It’s more efficient for everyone.
I love using social listening for immediate reads on changes to our app. It’s incredible to report back to a product team in almost real-time how their features are being discussed online. We can quickly identify things to amplify or challenges to overcome.
In general, it’s great to use quotes from real people online to connect users with other people at Fetch who may not get the opportunities to interact with consumers the way that I do. They love it!
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
Be creative! Try new things! Fail, learn, and then try something new! Succeed, learn, and then repeat…and also try something new! Join communities to chat with other social listening professionals to help. We all love to talk to and learn from each other.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
A little bit of both.
Helpful, but only if it’s with a human at the wheel. AI is not perfect, but it provides some key benefits (like speed to insights) when used in conjunction with a human who can actually check and double check that the findings are accurate. And you still need a human to contextualize the findings and make them relevant for your brand.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
My one wish would be an easier way to effectively forecast trends…it’s much easier to reflect and monitor in-the-moment…it’s a lot harder to forecast and be correct in those forecasts.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
I’m a team of one for now, and to be honest, I wouldn’t change anything about how I uplifted the capability at Fetch.
I’d still identify the low-hanging fruit projects that would be easiest to execute, but still have a direct and tangible relationship to company goals. This is to prove out the value of the approach.
I’d still engage with education-building and teaching other teams at Fetch about the capability, including its use cases and limitations. And I’d still show up to those meetings with examples directly applicable to each team.
I’d still offer social intelligence analyses without being asked for it, as other teams at Fetch get used to what the capability is and how it can be used. Building trust this way means broader acceptance and opportunities for social intelligence at Fetch in the future.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
All of the possibilities! Things are always changing, from data sources to AI to best practices to innovative use cases - it feels like we’re learning something new every day. I can’t wait to dig in and learn alongside the community of social listening professionals–it’ll be an adventure!
Get Social with SILab
