What does social intelligence mean to you?
Incorporating social data into your current methodologies and decision making process, which impacts a wide number of use cases and jobs-to-be-done, but also areas of the business. Sometimes, it is confused with “understanding performance, conversation and audience” in a given social channel, rather than being a source of insights that can inform strategy & tactics across the board.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
We feel that social intelligence has been around forever. However, it is in the early stages of development, crossing the chasm to that “Early Majority”. Social data has the potential to change large industries like market research, accelerate development for nascent industries like e-sports/gaming and beauty, and allow brands to go from one-fit all campaigns to join cultural movements and be more relatable. While social is still a minority percentage of the total advertising spend, it is probably informing the rest of the spend. Social data is a fascinating deep rabbit hole, where many professionals outside marketing & advertising, wouldn’t realise how social data is embedded in some of their processes or systems they use.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
Understanding that social data wouldn’t typically deliver the complete solution. Following the chasm model, it is great to partner with “Early Adopters”, whether brands or agencies, who have a vision of where social data fits, and co-create solutions that help them scale & innovate. Also, having an open mind to the ecosystem and partners, as we are all working together to develop the adoption of social data. And therefore, respecting your partners/clients, and asking for the same respect.
As someone I admired reminded me recently:
“- do WORK that I love (Ikigai); AND
– with COLLEAGUES who challenge and support me; AND
– for CLIENTS I respect (and who respect me!); AND
– to build BRANDS that make a difference in the world”
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
Making the time to take a step back and map the space, needs and solutions. Secondly, being hyper transparent on what we do and how it is powered, so that others know where we fit and help. Finally, as a vendor, taking a long term view of monetisation so that you get to interact with more visionaries and practitioners to learn from.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
Social data is fast-moving: from sources, to the structure of the data, how to access it, and the compliance & regulations around such data.
Taking compliance as an example, the world seems to still be debating whether scraping is legal or not; last year, we saw how scraping looked in the USA, but no one could really see how this is a long term or global view.
Overall, compared to other data, social data needs more transparency in sources and how some of the data is derived. For instance, Twitter is still probably the largest source of compliant data powering social intelligence, yet many people using social data are unaware of its implications.
What does being a social intelligence pioneer mean in the context of your work?
It pushes you to focus on building a community; speaking to more industry practitioners to help understanding social data, so that we can all together continue to develop compliant methodologies and, as a result, more players can apply them to their businesses. In a nutshell: helping social intelligence crossing the infamous chasm!
Get Social with SILab
