What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
Senior Social Intelligence Analyst.
The average internet user spends 2.5 hours across 6.2 social media platforms every day. The younger you are, the more that time increases, with teens spending as much as 5.8 hours across various platforms.
As Social Intelligence analysts, we step outside the algorithm, providing a bird's eye view of what's happening on the ground, observing trends and murmurations in real time and at scale.
People often forget that behind every data point is a human being, a story, an outcome, or a moment that matters. For us, it's not the data that sets you apart, because everyone has access to it. It’s how you analyse it and what you do with it that matters. That's what it means to be data-driven, which is why we are also turning our hand to larger scale corporate strategy and consulting projects.
We are always looking for new applications. More recently, that means using some of the natural language processing techniques we were using for social listening and applying them to other data sets: surveys, product reviews, complaints, and email marketing. If it's text, images, or even video, we now have the tools to analyse it, and faster than ever before, so the possibilities really are endless.
What attracted you to social listening?
For me, research is me-search. I love being immersed in culture. Data science is such a new discipline; it's only been around for a few years, and there's a lot of low-hanging fruit.
When the data fellowship came along, it was the perfect way to combine my skills. I had previously studied cultural theory, but it was always so theoretical, and social intelligence was a way of taking that theory and making it practical. I have a very visual brain, so for me, a good chart is worth a thousand words… Literally!
The best projects for me are the ones that resonate with me on an individual level, where I already have some background knowledge and can take it to the next level. A top-level analysis is great for telling you what you already know and quantifying it, but it's only when you go deeper that you are confronted with the unexpected.
I love going really deep into things; my deep dives are Hadalpelagic. I always try to get right down into the Mariana Trench. That's where you find the outliers.
But it's not just depth, but the diversity of the projects that keeps me here. One minute I could be doing Real Beauty for Dove, the next Sustainability for Cargill or Telecommunications for Nokia, and they all feed into each other in unpredictable ways…
Working for the Gates Foundation was a real game-changer for me; it really allowed me to see what a positive impact we can have in the world, so I’d like to dedicate more time to doing that kind of work in the future.
What’s the hardest thing you have learned or challenge you’ve overcome? How did you do it?
Covid was a tough one for me. I was an events journalist, rarely in the office, always out looking for stories. I remember it vividly; the last piece I published was in early March, but I’d been watching it unfold since early Jan. It was quite surreal watching it from the newsroom because you could see it coming… the impending doom.
The first few weeks were filled with hubris. I had already applied for Ogilvy and had an interview date set! But when it got cancelled, I realised the next one wouldn’t be for a while…
I was determined not just to be another covid casualty. I started frantically messaging people on LinkedIn and taking as many online courses as I could. Thank you to Julian Cole, David Adamson, and the many others who replied!
I got the job in December that year; it was so stressful as we had to re-apply, and there were four times as many of us going for the same position. I’m so grateful for Ogilvy for everything they’ve done for me. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were still in the midst of Covid. I wouldn’t meet my colleagues face to face for another six months!
What’s your career highlight to date?
For a proper AI nerd, it would have to be working on WatsonX for IBM. It was such an interesting project because IBM knows everything there is to know about AI… Deep Blue defeated Kasparov around the time I was born, and as a company, they've been around over 100 years longer than OpenAI.
What I was doing was really the opposite - finding out what people thought about AI who didn’t really know about AI. It was fascinating; people had such intense hopes and fears about this new technology. On the one hand, you had a faction of evangelists convinced it would solve all of our problems (a lot of them had previously been in blockchain), then on the other, you had a paranoid group terrified about AGI taking over the world, and then the rest, who were more interested in science than science fiction, who had slightly more realistic fears around automation and job losses, and hopes around its applications in the medical and sustainability sectors.
The real insight we derived here was that the public didn’t really understand there were different forms of AI. For them, it was all AI, so we had to make this distinction around ‘New AI’, Large Language Models, and Gen. Ai, and ‘Old AI’, machine learning, and traditional recommender systems that have been around since the 1960s. This is really what we do in market research, get to the real why and the hidden who.
What key skills do you need to get started in social listening?
Technical knowledge can be taught, but listening can't be. You don’t need data to do Social Listening. Everyone who is saving a meme on Instagram or reposting something on social media is doing Social Listening. I’d rather hire someone who's really deep in TikTok culture than someone who's written a few thousand lines of Python because when they analyse the data, they find it much easier to separate the signal from the noise.
The effectiveness of the analyst lies not only in the ability to identify what is being said and who is saying it but also, why are they saying it? It’s here that Social Intelligence has a lot in common with Strategy. While people may be a lot more truthful on social media than they are in a focus group, the old Ogilvy adage ‘People don't think what they feel, don't say what they think and don't do what they say’ still rings true. A junior analyst might see a spike in the phrase ‘Every Little Helps’, and go isn't this brilliant, Tesco mentions are up 1590%, but if you're familiar with the nuances of British satire, it's actually an indicator of negative brand health.
A great example of this is my favourite bottled water brand, Liquid Death. They identified a community: ‘straight edge,’ came up with an insight: ‘why can’t taking care of your health be punk,’ and marketed that to a wider audience. They listened to what was already happening on social, extrapolated it, and now they have a 700m valuation and more followers than Evian. That's the power of Social Listening.
Is working in social listening what you expected?
It certainly isn’t, but it makes sense retrospectively. Not all opportunities are immediately obvious, but I’ve never felt happier. Initially, I wanted to be an artist; I have some work on display as you come into WPP. But the data and creativity aren’t at odds with one another. There's been a bit of an aversion to data in the industry from people who like to go with their gut. But the more data there is, the more creativity there is involved. This is especially true at Ogilvy.
There is a real drive to make sure the strategy is creative, and the creative is strategic. In the agency world, social intelligence is breaking out of the silo of social & content, just as in the wider world, social media has come to impact everything we do. Ten years ago, no one thought they’d wake up in the morning and check Instagram…. now its second nature.
In a wider sense, I see myself as more of a Strategist who happens to have all these Data Analysis skills. I could easily see myself switching roles and moving into the Strategy or Consulting side of the business, but I’d still be using all the same tools. There is a synergy in the way all the departments are coming together. I really don’t think it’s impossible in the next few years that we will see Heads of Strategy with a background in Social Intelligence. I think everyone is waking up to the realisation that that's where the insights are. This is where the culture is happening.
Is there anyone in the industry you look up to?
My manager, Sam Coates, who made the SI Insider 50 last year, has always been inspiring. He's a crazy inventor, never content with the status quo, and that's really what you need to maintain a competitive edge. If you're just using off-the-shelf tools, you're never going to get that competitive insight.
Robyn Darcy, who I worked with only briefly at Ogilvy, has become somewhat of a mentor for me. I’ve always been really impressed with the way she talks about data. Like me, she also started out in journalism, and there is so much overlap there. You're always chasing stories, trying to make meaning out of this mess.
Albert-László Barabási, the founder of Network Science, is someone I really couldn't do any of the work I'm currently involved with without; he paved the way. He’s responsible for the Network Turn that's dominating academia at the moment. We do cool stuff with networks, but you should really see what they are doing in Criminology and Economics; it's mind-blowing the potential there.
And finally, all my colleagues at Ogilvy, especially all the great people who I got to work with during my time in Strategy and Behavioral Science. Juniors starting out in the industry aren’t always considered as people to look up to, but I find their energy electrifying. Others I could name are Lauren Mollyneaux-Brown, who helped me get the job and who spearheaded a big DEI move at the firm, Charlotte Walters, Dan Bennett, Kate Wheaton, Jo Arden, Matthew Straker-Taylor, Yuka Uchijima… There are too many to name!
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