How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I spent the first 5 years of my career in the tried-and-true, 'traditional' consumer insights world, meaning managing marketing research surveys & focus groups in the agency, consultancy and client-side positions.  I then started to see consumer behavior shifting more towards digital and social, with brands following suit. This made me decide to pursue this new business need for social media measurement (this was back when brands were first getting on Twitter and the idea of social listening was just getting started). A grad school colleague gave me an opportunity to join his agency to sit in-house at our automotive client's site, building out their social media reporting structure from scratch, but with the same rigorous methodological approach to research that the client's executive teams were used to seeing from other channels. So, I jumped right into the tools, learned on the fly and stood up the social listening capability for the client, just in time for a huge social-driven Super Bowl campaign (way before the industry's current state, where practically every Super Bowl ad has a social extension). From there, I never looked back, dedicating the next 10 years of my career to the ever-changing world of social intelligence, pressure-testing and vetting every major tool & approach while leading analyst teams on the agency, consultancy and client-side of the marketing world.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Over the years, I've been lucky enough to work with tons of brands, large and small, building out social intelligence capabilities and distributing actionable insights to drive their business decisions. But, my proudest achievement was a rare opportunity to apply social intelligence outside the marketing space. When the COVID-19 vaccine was just getting close to approval in late 2020, I was approached by a state health department in the US to help them gauge the sentiment and emotions around vaccine acceptance vs. vaccine hesitation in their state compared to the national average. I was able to help them pinpoint which regions of their state were over-indexing for specific emotions like fear, anger or hope in relation to the vaccine's development, and then identify the influential drivers of each emotion across the state. For the negative influencers that I identified who were driving misinformation, fear and anger about the vaccine, I was able to alert the state health officials of the untrue narratives gaining the most buy-in from consumers so that they could combat each narrative with science-driven facts. For the positive influencers I identified generating hope for the upcoming vaccine, I was able to help the health officials to develop PSA campaign ideas, working with those local influencers in their state to advocate for vaccination. For someone who usually is tasked with helping a brand market a product or service, I will always look back with pride on this COVID-19 vaccine advocacy project as an example of how social intelligence can create positive change for society.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
Proactive listening is extremely important within our organization, and that of course includes what's being discussed on social media. A key tenet of our organization's approach is to pay attention to anecdotes, since they keep you connected to the customer experience and allow you to find the root cause of an issue, which can solve not only that customer's needs, but many like them potentially dealing with the same issue. Where better can you consistently identify insightful & actionable anecdotes than on social media?
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
Social media usage will continue to grow in 2022, and therefore the importance of analyzing those social trends will continue to grow for our organization. One of the biggest opportunities I'm excited for in 2022 is combining the insights from social intelligence with the insights drawn from other data throughout the business, so that each insight we deliver to decision-makers becomes less siloed and more actionable.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
Regardless of the size or nature of the organization, it all comes back to actionable insights.
Building out a social intelligence capability for a brand marketing team or business leadership team with the end result simply being a dashboard of volume, sentiment and other social metrics will never gain buy-in because that approach is rarely actionable. It's likely to get a response of - OK, so what? What do I do with this information?
Instead, having the tools & dashboards be the springboard for insightful questions of your stakeholders about their business challenges will gain more buy-in, because it takes the conversation past the vanity metrics and into their world. That approach is much more likely to get an answer of 'that's interesting, can you dig further into X, because I'm having this business challenge and need to understand what the customers are saying in order to solve it'.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Building off the last question, first things first is to start by asking your clients and stakeholders what they feel their key business challenges & opportunities are. Ask a ton of questions to get to know their business needs. Then, and only then, can you go back and develop the query-building and report-building approach that will meet their needs.
Secondly, in my experience, I've rarely had success when starting with brand-level queries. It feels second nature to start with the easy query, tracking the conversation mentioning your client's or stakeholder's brand, and then working up from there; but, this often leads to the client feeling underwhelmed by the result, since there's a chance the conversation about their brand will unearth insights they are already aware of. Instead, start by learning as much as you can about their business needs and industry challenges, and then have your first query be a broader topic analyzing consumer conversation related to those needs and challenges. This is much more likely to unearth actionable consumer insights that your client or stakeholder was unaware of, which can drive actions that lead to business growth and competitive whitespace opportunities.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
I would like to see social intelligence not be so tethered to its marketing roots. Even in 2022, where we see the power that social media has across every aspect of society, there are many organizations that still only have their social teams and customer service teams using their social intelligence tools. They are missing the opportunity to distribute the never-ending stream of insights from social media far & wide throughout their organization, which not only will better inform decision-making but also create cost efficiencies for the tool investments.
Secondly, I'd like to see the gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots' of social intelligence be narrowed. There are tens of thousands of small & medium sized business owners (including both small brands and small agencies) that would love to be able to benefit from the insights gained through social intelligence, but simply can't afford the tools like their bigger competitors can. This creates an even greater disparity in competition, making it even harder for the smaller players to succeed. I'd like to challenge the leading tool providers across the industry to find ways to make their tools more accessible to the 'have nots' of the world.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
If you think that social media conversation isn‚'t relevant to your business, you probably have never thought to ask your social teams for broad cultural trend and/or industry-level topic analysis. Trust me, there are relevant and actionable insights to be gained from social intelligence for almost every industry out there... if you know what to ask for.
Finally, social media conversation volume will continue to grow every year, as your customer audience becomes younger and more socially native; if you're still ignoring social media's impact on your business' bottom line, you're going to get left behind.
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