Has the perception of social intelligence changed within your organisation since you won last year’s SI Insider 50? If so, how?
Yes we continue to make progress – and among our 2022 wins was a callout for one of our major stakeholder insight projects on a company-wide ‘all hands’ broadcast to 12,000 colleagues. However, when it comes to driving visibility at the most senior level, I do try to be pragmatic and temper expectations. Social intelligence projects are additive and enriching to other research, but generally unlikely to be ‘the hero’ in their own right – I often describe social listening in particular as a tool to raise the water level – lifting many boats by a small amount. With this in mind, it’s sensible to think about driving horizontal as well as vertical impact in a large organisation like Sage – finding the teams across the business that could have use cases that social intelligence could support, but who may not automatically think about that potential and proactively come to you with a brief. This supports a ROI case that is built around accumulated value rather than one big project. Viewed through that lens, we’ve made great progress in the last year and established lasting connections with a really wide set of stakeholders, from ecommerce / trading, through corporate affairs to customer service.
What’s the most interesting social listening project you’ve worked on in the last year?
In 2023 our business has a strategic focus on understanding and nurturing advocacy and evangelism by our stakeholders – colleagues, customers and channel partners. This focus was shaped by a really fascinating social intelligence project that we designed and ran last year which aimed to help us better understand one of our most important global channel audiences. This audience did not participate in the way we expected in sources like Twitter or Reddit – which of course provide the bulk of data that we see in social listening technology platforms – but we learned that they do engage on social media in different places, and their activity in those places is significant and rich with insight. Because of this challenge, the project involved a lot of heavy lifting, standing up new processes and methods to assure ethical compliance, data integrity, and to maintain good governance. The output has been fascinating – we’ve learned about the audience at both a macro and micro level, created instruments to set objectives for our progress in nurturing advocacy, tools to measure performance, and ongoing insight analysis to identify topics, issues and individual ‘influencers’ that could help us create advantage through evangelism.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
Technical and research skills are the foundation, but soft skills make the difference. I see two areas in particular as key. First, a ‘sales’ mind / skillset – because social intelligence is a developing discipline, and often seen as a ‘nice to have’. Time spent building a boutique agency in a commercial role was invaluable in helping me develop the core skills of persuasion – understanding value drivers, and developing compelling project proposals. Secondly, the ability to craft narratives and tell stories – with the ability to create genuinely impactful reports and data visualisations’ playing a big role.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
Of course social intelligence is a research discipline and calls on a broad skillset – starting with social science fundamentals, moving through domain knowledge, then technical competence with software and other tools and finishing with the ability to tell compelling stories with data through reports and briefings.
However, in my personal career, I have always felt that qualities are as important as skills – starting with curiosity about people and what drives them; flexibility – to redirect focus towards shifting priorities or opportunities; persuasiveness – to pitch for and win commitment to ideas that fall outside existing templates; and finally creativity – to identify the inflection points where insights can be directed at real opportunities to create value.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
It provides a genuinely unique perspective on most audiences, and literally the only way of gathering insights about some.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
At core, I am motivated by curiosity and challenge. Social media is notoriously a moving target: platforms rise and fall, regulatory frameworks change, user behaviours adapt in unexpected ways, and the tools that we rely on for research continue to evolve. In this context, social intelligence is never anything less than interesting (or challenging…), and I can’t imagine a day when it is not a major part of my role.
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