How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
Inadvertently lol. I studied economics in college and elected to pursue my MBA shortly after, quickly realizing that I'd need a job to pay for it. I knew I was a good number cruncher and that I wanted to be in healthcare, so when I received an offer to join W2O Group (now called Real Chemistry) it was a pretty easy choice.
I held a few different roles there but my very first was more a data science role, where I was given access to the company's social listening tool to provision datasets for my research colleagues. I was fascinated by the technology and the challenge of automating what were otherwise completely manual processes (sort here, parse there, normalize these, etc.). I eventually grew into a hybrid role where I wasn't just modeling data but actually writing the insights (duties that were kept separate); and that's when I began to see the potential for turning this into a long-term career.
2 years later I accepted a role at Pfizer to build out a brand-new team and capability, something called 'social intelligence'. I quickly onboarded our new but all-too-familiar listening tool and got to work, tapping into every ounce of skill I had (data viz, coding, storytelling, etc.). Months later, my consumer healthcare business unit was spun off and combined with GSK's via a joint venture, expanding my remit from 8 brands to roughly 25. No big deal.
Over the last 3 years or so my team and I transformed our in-house social intelligence capabilities into the insights engine it is today, responsible for delivering everything from product research and brand health to audience segmentation and influencer measurement. Social media data has become low-hanging fruit for companies looking to upskill their tech stack and decision making, and we're no exception. I couldn't be prouder to lead this team here at GSK, the largest consumer healthcare business in the world.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
I'm very proud of what I've been able to achieve as our social intelligence pioneer, but I'm even prouder of the contributions I've made to building a stronger community.
Like any field, progressive change happens when people come together as a discipline to share, celebrate, teach, and dare I say, listen. I've had the opportunity to meet so many amazing practitioners in this space over the years, each with their own unique story to tell. And when you hear enough stories, it's a little easier to connect like-minded people with one another. It's one thing to make connections for yourself but it's another to make them for other people.
The trust, respect, and friendship that I've developed with experts from all corners of the social intelligence industry is easily my proudest achievement.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
We use social data to answer a wide variety of questions, thanks to the extremely active userbases that exist on today's mainstream social media apps. What's nice about the intersection of social and healthcare (and any industry really) is that consumers are going to voice their opinions unsolicited, i.e., there's no stimulus required to get answers out of them.
For e.g., consumers may express their distaste for a certain flavored product, whether that's tangerine Emergen-C or any of our fruit-flavored Tums. This is something that we can categorize and map out to see A) what flavors are most frequently discussed and B) what's the sentiment associated with that flavor. Over time we can see hey there's a strong and consistent correlation between keywords like 'nasty' and 'Brand A', is this selling in stores? Do we need to scale back production? Change up the assortment? Create a new format? These types of insights help us ask the right questions and make better decisions.
Another focus we've had is around audience analysis and improving our targeting schemes. For e.g., what types of professionals should we be going after that suffer from light-induced headaches or migraines? We know that the condition we treat is profession-agnostic, but where are our underserved consumers? Social media taught us that day laborers exposed to the sun all day suffer from migraines, as do teachers and office workers who are exposed to hours of overhead and PC-lights.
Social listening techniques help us collect and organize themes (both organic and specified) from any stakeholder type and for any question. Even if that question yields 0 results, our answer becomes 'this isn't actively discussed'. There are many more examples we could share, but to summarize they're often bucketed into these two scenarios.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
We've reached a stage in our maturity model where the success we’ve seen in the US (my team) will be gradually deployed across other priority markets, including our wonderful neighbors in Canada. Not every market will require the same degree of investment as the US though, especially when you consider the fact that something like 90%+ conversations originate in the US. And that's okay!
We've recently onboarded a second social listening tool that's better equipped to scale across our company and deliver the insights we need to even more teams than before. Through this new platform, we'll be able to leverage more comprehensive analytics (widget variety, drill-ability, etc.), enjoy greater power-user autonomy (less time in offline analysis), and finally put this data in the hands of our fellow colleagues (to a degree).
Companies today wrestle with the optimal support model, between a center of excellence or COE (spoon-fed insights) and self-service (DIY insights); this in my experience is one of the great challenges in our field. You can't expect everyone to learn the basics of a dashboard to get answers alone, but you also can't do deep dives everyday... especially when you oversee 25+ brands. There's a balance to strike, and that's what we're looking to achieve here in year 3. Among other things.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
This I've learned will vary by company; some are simply less interested in running this type of work while others lack the knowledge and/or resources to get started. Thankfully, I've always had buy-in here from my bosses and teammates, that's what's great about being on an insights & analytics team, it's a natural fit. But that doesn't mean I didn't have to fight to showcase how powerful this data was.
When I first started out, we had to raise awareness and excitement for what this data could do, real grassroots stuff. Social media is cool and relatable, almost everyone is on it in one way or another so we had that going for us; we just needed to convince people that this was valuable and not just something we own to say that we own it. We started small, surfacing simply what people were saying about our brands, sharing screenshots everywhere we could. We plotted out trendlines and highlighted verbatims relevant to questions we were already asking, connecting the dots between existing business needs and this on-demand trove of information. It didn't take long for people to recognize how useful this could be once operationalized.
The keys to success here are time, energy, and a relentless commitment to doing the little things well. Writing new queries, important. Cleaning out irrelevant conversations, important. Organizing your queries into folders, important. Standardizing your raw data formats, important. Having regular conversations with your stakeholders and their needs, important. All these little details build healthy habits for our team and are major contributors to our success.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
• Do your due diligence.
• Talk to other people who do this type of work.
• Talk to vendors aout what you're looking to get out of 3P tools.
• Talk to professors who are beginning to teach this more.
• And, if you can, talk to students about the career opportunities in this field.
From other people you'll get outside perspective on how others analyze data, there is no standard or best practice for this yet. Seek out people in other industries, you'd be amazed how much I've learned from people who do this in food/beverage, cosmetics, B2B, retail, and consumer technology.
From vendors you'll keep your eyes and mind fresh when it comes to new features, ways to analyze data, sources, etc. Vendors in this space are highly competitive and do a lot of the same things well, look for distinctions between them; it'll force them to think more innovatively too.
From professors you can get a better sense of how they see and teach social media, marketing, research, analytics, and so many other fields that fold into social intelligence. I've found that bridging the gap between academia and the business world is highly valuable to both parties.
Lastly students! Companies are facing a significant labor shortage in our field, simply because not enough college grads know that this is a thing. Use your expertise and experience to educate the next generation of talent; it'll serve your company and industry well! Social intelligence isn't going anywhere (except 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀).
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
I'd really like to see more predictive capabilities, built out from historical data, two unique challenges that the field faces today. How do we know what a good predictor looks like? How can we get a hold of more data to train when it's trapped in a rolling 12-month listening period box?
Visual/Image recognition and accompanying analytics is another capability I'd love to see in these tools. We've missed a lot of cultural and brand-specific moments because a post was just a picture, no keywords, no context, nothing. This isn't uncommon on social media and presents a great opportunity to create Image or Video intelligence as a subbranch of social intelligence.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
You hear the phrase 'customer obsession' a lot these days, it's really overused but rightfully so. Your customers, users, patients, stakeholders, whoever, are important north stars for your business and to meet their needs and demands you'll have to meet them where they are, on social media. If you truly want to obsess over your customers you'll have to learn about and obsess over the things they like, not what you or your company likes.
There are so many use cases for social data, especially in product innovation. Innovation is what pushes companies forward and keeps them alive and relevant, so why not go to the largest source of innovation there is? Customers are extremely educated and great soundboards for pros, cons, needs, wants, etc. Social intelligence isn't a turnkey solution, it requires growth! As it grows, you'll be able to branch out into new use cases and double down on the ones your team does well or are most pertinent to your business.
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