What was your journey/career path to your current position?
I started my career as a tech investment banker and then jumped on to the roller coaster that is the startup world. Early on in my career, my first startup experience was in MoSoSo (mobile social software) where I was exposed to the likes of Dodgeball (Google) or Odeo (Twitter). My next venture was Fits.me (sold to Rakuten), a virtual fitting room, which revealed how the value was not in the virtual fitting room but the consumer data behind the usage. Finally, I joined Socialbro (aka Audiense) in 2012 for the first round of investment, and have since been sucked into the white rabbit hole of social data.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
At Audiense we pride ourselves on developing great dialogue with practitioners, competitors, and any experts. The vision is to build together Audience Intelligence and Consumer Intelligence categories and how to build-out the right stacks of platforms & humans. Transparency means stronger frameworks and solution partnerships with the customer in mind.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
Establishing methodology to incorporate social data into your decision making process, whether it is product development, marketing strategies or other jobs-to-be done. It's much more than the mere visualization of the social conversation, it does not always have to be a geeky and complex analysis of the data by an insights practitioner. After all, many of the users of social data are marketers and SMBs trying to find an answer to a problem or jobs-to-be-done.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
Two key challenges.
#1 Traditionally, there was no clear owner or use case for social intelligence, with multiple approaches within the same organisation, whether it came from agencies/consultancies or in-house practitioners.
#2 The lack of understanding what social data truly is available, or compliant. If we take a step back, social understood as channels makes us ask: 'what would happen if Facebook or Instagram disappear tomorrow?' Marketers always managed to adapt and find new channels. However, social data the way practitioners understand it is the profound change of consumers that depends massively on Twitter data, despite it not being the channel with the most engagement.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
Greater transparency from vendors and approaches to data collection and compliance, to increase trust and alignment. Thereby, there would be more transparency, collaboration and integration among vendors and brands/agencies. All in all, it would accelerate the development of the industry as one.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
More partnerships within the Insights stack, actionability options via partners, doubling down on the power of Likes data. We are particularly excited as we reckon there is c.10x more likes than conversations, which can be a step change in capturing culture intelligence.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving? 
In order to get more adoption beyond the current Early Majority (as coined by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm), and value from current users, we might see more pre-packaged products geared towards particular use cases and/or markets, with less flexibility on customization but easier to use and well-integrated with other data sources and/or platforms. As seen with other martech, this will mean the emergence of Marketplaces for tools, libraries, machine learning and services, that help the customer complete their stack.
Increasingly, the more sophisticated practitioners will create their own data repositories and visualizations, and use platforms as data collectors or processors.
Get Social with SILab
