How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I have a traditional market research background starting with survey quant data, and started as a Graduate Research Executive at a small agency before moving on do a Research Exec role at Bauer Media. After a few years I went back agency side and this is where I started to be exposed to some of the social listening teams we had, which we utilised alongside the quant teams, and I started to build this into final client narratives. When I started at LADbible Group, this was my first proper chance to get hands on with social intelligence – as the biggest social media publishers we had so much to dig into and I quickly started to learn to utilise this, and it added so much to my work. I am now Research and Insights Lead at LADbible Group.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
I learn by doing and love to be hands on. I click around in tools until I figure out what I want to do and what data I want, and I also am a focused on getting a good story out of the data. I approach projects questioning the “what, why and how” to get a good answer to research questions, and I also follow projects when they leave my team to see how they are used to constantly evolve how we do things to make them useful for others. I think being able to give someone one insight that they will use, rather than a full dataset, is so important to success in our work.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
Inquisitive, proactive and positive – I challenge what we do, add what I can and dig into things that interest and inspire me to add more value and learn.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
I love knowing what people think and feel, and I love getting that from real people. I genuinely find it so interesting to look at trends and data points to inform how we approach content at LADbible Group, and it’s great to see the work that social intelligence has inspired go live, and then see how people respond to that to feed into our next learnings.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
It’s natural and unfiltered. People will often respond to a survey with a slightly more muted response (although at LADbible we have focused our panel to do this less), but social data gives you a real view on how people comment and talk online, and often uncovers things that you won’t find elsewhere. I use it a lot as a starting point in projects, good social intelligence can guide the direction. There’s value in lots of data sources for different things, and it’s the fusion of them that I think doing well, ensures an excellent piece of research.
What does being a social intelligence evangelist mean in the context of your work?
It means I am constantly inspiring people to be accurately led by our audience. We are an audience first publisher, but by using social intelligence properly we are actioning changes most effectively and creating the best content we can.
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