How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
In 2013 a friend told me they’d heard about this company that needed people to decide whether tweets were positive or negative and, before work from home was common, I could do it from my couch. The company was Crimson Hexagon and it turns out the job she was trying to describe was hand coding and training the AI that came to be known as BrightView. It was the nascent stage of what Brandwatch now calls Custom Classifiers. Since then I’ve worked in social intelligence agency-side with high profile brands at MullenLowe and for the past 5.5 years brand-side with Universal Parks and Resorts.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
I am insatiably curious and a fast reader. I’m always trying to find a better way of doing something which has served me well as social media, consumer-wise and data-availability, shifts so quickly and often.
I seek out new relationships and am eager to work with different teams in my organization. Someone in creative, strategy, data science, research, branding… you name it, they have a fresh perspective and different questions which ultimately makes my project more useful as a finished product.
This cross-organization collaboration has helped put the spotlight on the value of social intelligence within Universal Parks. Since I founded the function, it has switched from the purview of our Chief Digital Officer to our Chief Strategy Officer as the benefits and insight I’ve provided have far outgrown the digital realm and are now seen as an important facet of our consumers’ mindset.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
I studied sociocultural anthropology as an undergrad: how people and cultures grow and develop. Anyone in social intelligence can tell you that’s what we’re watching every day; social media just allows growth and development faster than we would have thought possible twenty years ago. My studies didn’t teach me what to think but how.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
Working agency-side means I worked with a ton of different brands across industries but I generally only interacted with a few people at each and in similar departments. Now, brand-side, I’m learning how massive internal teams fit together.
Working with Universal Parks has been fascinating as it’s a bunch of brands in a trench coat. Am I looking at Minions with Illumination? Shrek with DreamWorks? Marvel in Orlando? Potter? Nintendo? Is this an entertainment company or a tourist destination? The sheer variety of research projects keeps me engaged and on my toes.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
Social data is available for us to analyze at scale as soon as it’s been shared: no waiting for transcriptions or survey gathering. There’s also just so much of it and it’s a constantly renewing source.
Generally unsolicited, there’s a conversational aspect inherent to social data that’s missing from structured responses. If people don’t care about something, there won’t be posts around it. If they do care, we’re swimming in verbatim. I love being able to dive in with a hypothesis then either continue downstream or divert when that proves not quite right.
What does being a social intelligence evangelist mean in the context of your work?
As an evangelist, it’s my job to demonstrate to my peers and clients that social intelligence data is a viable and valuable source of information. It has breadth and depth that we as researchers haven’t had access to before, providing additional direction for leaders where we may previously have had to cross our fingers and guess.
I spoke at the 2021 NBCU Analytics Summit, introducing real-world use cases for social intelligence to the broader NBCU organization. There were well over 100 dialed-in within the first few minutes from Peacock, Universal Pictures, and a plethora of NBC programming channels. I was proud to talk about my work and field questions from across the business as we all work toward greater understanding of our consumers.
People are desperate to be heard: we just need to listen.
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