How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I started in a small market research firm conducting surveys and focus groups while I was in graduate school for Psychology. This field of work really fit my interests in understanding and impacting the motivations behind why consumers acted the way they did. I moved on afterwards to Universal Music Group to help lead the Global Insights team, bringing my years of quantitative and qualitative research to firmly establish utilizing consumer insights in our distribution and growth strategies. One thing that quickly became evident was that, in the entertainment space, things shifted quickly and the turn-around time for these traditional projects were a major barrier. That's when we discovered using social intelligence to quickly provide the voice of the consumer to our business stakeholders. I was then brought onto WarnerMedia to help start up and lead the Global Social Intelligence department, where we provide near-real time understandings of the latest trends and a comprehensive dive into how content from both WarnerMedia and its competitors are being engaged with by the increasingly digital consumer.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
While many would focus in on the biggest, highest exposure project here, my proudest achievement of my career is building my department from a small team of 3 to an amazing team of 17 social intelligence professionals who are not only familiar with the languages of 19 territories around the globe, but also can communicate the cultural nuances and current events to our various stakeholders across WarnerMedia. This team allows WarnerMedia to have a global perspective on how consumers are engaging with both our brands and content, as well as our competitors.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
Social data is seen as an important aspect in business decision-making at WarnerMedia. My team is engaged with utilizing social data to support multiple divisions and functions of the company: corporate communications teams to understand any issues that may arise for any of our properties and content, marketing teams to understand activation opportunities and strategies that would have the most impact at driving interest and intent to consume, partnership teams to understand brands and influencers that would be most effective at reaching relevant audiences, and development teams to find opportunities to create new content.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
Social intelligence is only going to get more visibility. With COVID impacting how consumers are communicating and consuming, more and more information is now available for my team to identify trends and opportunities that directly impact WarnerMedia properties. With the continued global rollout of HBO Max as well as the launch of a brand new streaming service with CNN+, understanding the voice of the consumer on social media and how to best gain interest in our content on these platforms will be that much more important.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
The great thing about social intelligence is that the fields of traditional quantitative and qualitative research has already broken down many of the barriers for organizational buy-in. Social intelligence allows organizations to receive real-time information from digital engagement as well as near-real time quantification of qualitative social listening to understand what makes our consumers tick. The data that comes from our work in social intelligence is not stand-alone as well - our results can feed into providing an informed and data-backed foundation for quantitative and qualitative studies that can dive further into aspects where social intelligence has its limitations.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
The whole point of social intelligence is the power of understanding the digital consumer. While likes, comment counts, and shares are straight forward, understanding the verbatims and what the consumer means when they are commenting is nuanced. Having a pulse on the latest trends, memes, and news is extremely important so that when you report on the voice of the consumer, you can help provide the context in which the consumer is coming from. At the end of the day, the teams that are looking for information don't know what to pay attention to in the mess that is social media. Social intelligence teams should strive to distill this down so that stakeholders understand what is most important and why they need to act upon this information. A good social intelligence report can showcase its value through the story that it tells, not just by relaying the numbers.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
Social intelligence is a rather new field of consumer intelligence, and I think companies are still wrangling at what is the best way to engage and use this new source of information. Social intelligence leaders should have a seat at the decision-making table, where ideas are still being formulated, rather than being engaged after the ideas have already been decided upon. By being part of idea generation, leaders can understand what consumers truly desire and identify pitfalls to avoid.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
Those engaging with your brand, or your competitors' brands, on social media are often unfiltered. Social intelligence teams allow companies to understand quickly and effectively what these highly engaged fans desire. Decisions that ignore what this vocal fandom have to say risk not being relevant at best or cause controversies at worst.
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