How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
After college I was working for an Angel investment group in New York City and was introduced to a startup entering the space. I joined as their first full-time employee and had the opportunity to learn all things social intelligence from the ground up. I later moved to a boutique digital agency, leading big data and social intelligence projects for several large, global brands including H&M, Spotify and IKEA, and integrating more deeply with teams executing across digital. Next, I jumped over to a PR agency, taking what I learned and applying it to the comms world. That led me to my role at Walmart now, where I can develop solutions that result in tangible, real-world outcomes at scale across the business.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Having spent my entire career in this space, my biggest achievement is having the privilege to educate and bring others along the journey of learning and understanding. When I first started at Walmart 6 years ago, we had maybe 3 people on our social intelligence platform. When I last checked that number of users had grown to the thousands. It's gratifying to watch others learn and grow and see the innovation that takes place.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
Right now, social intelligence data is being leveraged across several facets of the business. It's a critical variable we strive to incorporate in as many decisions as we can, and to better understand the environments in which we operate. We're seeing people lean into it as a new skill set regardless of their role in the organization - from public affairs and global responsibility to merchandising and forecasting - it's a critical component that's helping us move faster and with more efficiency.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
My expectation is that it's only going to continue to scale and become more integrated. More immediately I think we'll see new advancements in how it's being utilized across our merchandising teams to inform things like assortment, and new use cases as we look to understand more deeply the wants and needs across the local communities where we operate.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
It's important to bring people along for the journey as you build out the capability, both at the leadership level and with those managing the day-to-day decisions on the ground. You must work at it from both angles. It's also critical to make sure that you fully understand the business problem, decision or process you are solving for or looking to influence with social intelligence. At the end of the day, you need to be driving some sort of action with the output of your intelligence program for the value to be realized by your organization.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Implementing new solutions in a meaningful way takes time. The analogy that always sticks with me, is that it's a marathon, not a sprint. Narrow your scope, don't try to boil the ocean, automate where you can, and stay focused on the action that can be taken from the data and insights you provide.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
I'd like to see the discipline and data more seamlessly integrated alongside other data assets and business models that companies are leveraging to drive decision making. That could include anything from sales and review data to investments and patents being filed or even external economic indicators. It's an always-on, real-time signal that can enhance and accelerate these other existing data sets.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies
Social media data is one of the largest sources of real-time customer and business insights that exists. Think of it as a focus group with billions of people expressing their opinions all at once, and businesses, stakeholders and markets reacting to events in real-time. Tapping into this data can not only help you understand what's happening in the moment but can help uncover signals about what's coming next. Democratizing this data across the business where everyone can extract value from it, will create competitive advantage by increasing speed to insight and the precision in which decisions are made.
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