What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I have been in the technology marketing research industry for 25 years. In 2018 I was given the task to reinvent our social research practice and decided to bend it toward a primary research objective. Hence the social intelligence practice was born with a mission to create primary research methodologies using organic social media data.
What has been your biggest career achievement?
Working for Microsoft I have been privileged to help create, market, and launch products that are used by billions of people every day (Windows 10, Windows 11, Teams, M365). Seeing the scale of the work I do manifest daily in literally billions of user interactions is something difficult to fathom, and something I am immensely proud of!
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
One that stands out was a social satisfaction study we did in three weeks at the beginning of the pandemic for Teams. Adoption was increasing at an alarming rate and we needed to understand how satisfied people were with Teams relative to competition. Primary research methods couldn’t do that. Social intelligence could. Amazing stuff!
Have you had any social listening fails?
What did you learn? For years we’ve been trying to figure out a brand tracking methodology. We’ve given this at least five decent runs and can’t figure out how to negate the bias apparent in social media (ie, it’s hard to understand unaided awareness from a sample of people who organically talk about brands). We’ll get this, just haven’t done it in a measurable way yet.
What’s one thing you think people have wrong about social intelligence?
Two of the most common things I have to answer are “Social intelligence is just an analysis of X (Twitter)” and “Social intelligence is just an analysis of angry people living in their mother’s basement”. Both couldn’t be further from the truth. I believe the power of social intelligence is that you are analyzing data from people who both have something to say and are informed about the category. Why not use that information for competitive intelligence.
Do you have any tips for people looking to mature their social listening practice in org?
Stop thinking about social media data as social media data and instead, think about it as ‘the world’s largest focus group’. And with AI and other data analysis tools we can analyze that data in the same way we analyze large primary quantitative data sets. The enormity of these data sets allows us to find some really finite and actionable insights.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
This is a great question. I think the person who has made the most lasting impression on me is Jasmin Fischer from SHARE Creative. I take really ‘pie in the sky’ thoughts to her and she has never failed to help us create something meaningful from them. She’s amazing at her job and a very important industry leader.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
Social media data for intelligence will start to draw down to be source specific. For example, if you want to do an analysis on creative, you’ll focus your energy on sources like Instagram or TikTok. If you want to holistically understand how people see a category, you’ll focus on X or Reddit. We have seen data that shows that certain audiences don’t stray from a primary source, so understanding this audience to source relationship will be incredibly important to create intelligence.
Get Social with SILab
