What does social intelligence mean to you?
Social Intelligence is the comprehensive ability to answer any question a stakeholder could ask you about social media. This spans from in-depth research questions from a market researcher needing to complement their traditional research methodologies by understanding social conversation themes…to a social community manager needing to identify emerging real-time trends for content opportunities…to a brand manager needing to understand brand partnership opportunities through in-depth social audience affinity analysis…and everything in between. Social Intelligence is NOT just social listening, which can only answer certain questions. Social Intelligence is the comprehensive capability we need to strive for, and clearly define, as an industry.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
The curiosity of a qualitative researcher that can identify actionable themes from unstructured social conversation. The data manipulation skills of a quantitative researcher or data scientist that can predict and size an opportunity. The business acumen of a department head that can manage contract negotiations & multiple vendor relationships, as well as countless stakeholder & client relationships. The technical expertise of a software engineer to be able to assess every single aspect of a set of competing tools to find the right tech stack for an organization. The cool head of a PR lead that can quickly pivot into crisis monitoring mode and guide a nervous C-suite team through immediate recommended actions. The storytelling & presentation skills of an experienced TED Talk speaker, taking the audience on a journey from data to insight to action. All that, plus the flexibility of a gymnast, since the world of social media changes every day.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
There are many challenges, but the biggest is the combination of noisy unstructured data with a lack of necessary innovation from the tool providers to take sentiment accuracy seriously. The majority of brand marketers and C-Suite leaders don’t understand how social listening works, and therefore assume that it will be accurate and actionable out-of-the-box; they are looking for a silver bullet, like what they can get when investing in other research methodologies that are more structured. Therefore, the challenge for in-house social intelligence leads within brand organizations is balancing 1) the need to excite C-suite leadership about the value of social intelligence, with 2) the need to explain to those same executives the need for a team of humans at the helm to govern and manipulate the tools’ outputs. If an in-house social intelligence lead can only achieve one of those two key factors, their ability to fully democratize the capability throughout their organization will fail.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
I absolutely love the foresight use case for social intelligence. Partnering with my Foresight team counterparts has provided the first time that I’ve seen consistent direct revenue impact for social intelligence…meaning it’s the first time that I’ve seen C-Suite executives perk up when hearing about the capability. Integrating an organization’s social intelligence capability with its foresight capability allows insights on emerging social trends to be fed daily to futurists, innovation leads and R&D leads that can know exactly which trends present an immediate opportunity to put a product on shelves. Instead of only focusing on feeding trend insights to social strategists & content writers for proactive engagement opportunities (which are necessary to keep the brand relevant), providing those same daily insights to the foresight leaders of an organization allows them to connect the dots between multiple microtrends, understand the ‘why’ behind each microtrend and identify the macro consumer behavior change that is evolving before our eyes.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
Take a step back and consider whether you are in the right department within your organization. Are your insights only being shared with the social or PR team? Are you only being asked to track your brand’s conversation or maybe a couple competitors? If so, proactively start tracking broader topics about your industry, and share them with your manager, explaining that you’d like to present them to more teams throughout your organization: marketing, consumer research, innovation, R&D, foresight, etc. The broader the topics you analyze, the more value you will provide to your organization. If you have a good leader, they will see how your insights will make their entire team more valued and will support you. If they don’t, find informal opportunities to grab coffee with key stakeholders outside your team, explaining the key insights you have beneath your fingertips so they can open doors for you. Finally, once you get those moments where a leadership team is ready to hear the value of social intelligence, have your roadmap & vision ready to show the significant impact you can bring to the organization…along with the people, process and technology needed to unlock that impact on a consistent basis.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
100% helpful…as long as you take the time to focus the AI on what will be actionable. Your leadership teams need to understand that simply turning on a tool’s AI summaries is not a silver bullet on its own; you need the time and bandwidth to engage your key stakeholders in co-developing the focused prompts behind the AI summaries that will ensure actionable observations are generated. If you don’t take the time to focus the AI, then the summaries will either be so generic that they aren’t helpful to your stakeholders, or even worse, the tool will generate inaccurate statements that will cause your stakeholders to distrust the tool and feel underwhelmed. This is why a human-at-the-helm approach is crucial for success, governing the tool and evaluating the accuracy and actionability of the AI outputs and optimizing over time.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
More resources. With the explosion of AI and the efficiencies these tools can provide now, there is a hesitancy from leadership to provide the necessary amount of social intelligence experts to support the in-depth research needs of a large organization. This is because organizational leadership is trying to assess just how automated and democratized these tools can become, with the jury still being out in this regard as more innovation happens every day. There are three main pillars to building a successful capability: People, Process and Technology. From my experience, large organizations are more than willing to throw money at a new piece of Technology (shiny object syndrome), and can expect that the individual or small team can handle the Process of implementing that technology. The challenge is the People pillar, explaining the need to have multiple subject matter experts to churn out solid research on a daily basis…and how that, without investing in that People pillar, the legs of the chair could fall out from under the organization.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
I did exactly this two years ago at my organization. First, I assessed the current situation: the tools that were in place, the usage of those tools and the quality of the insights coming from them. Next, I spoke with many stakeholders across the organization, intentionally asking high-level questions about what they would ideally love to know from social media. This allowed me to create a custom list of the most important aspects of a tool stack I would need to have a successful social intelligence capability implementation, which I shared with each vendor I spoke to as a conducted my tool assessment. Finally, I developed an in-depth roadmap & vision document that covered the people, process and technology needed to implement a best-in-class capability within the organization, and presented this to leadership to gain buy-in. Fast forward two years later, and while there is still a lot of work to be done, I’m proud to say that I’ve been successful in launching the best-in-class capability I promised to leadership.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
I’m looking forward to continue working with each technology provider to keep pushing and innovating in the space, consistently mentioning how ‘ideally, I’d love to see the tool do this, this and this’ to get the provider’s reaction. I’m looking forward to working more directly with the social platforms themselves, gaining clarity on what is going to be available for listening on new APIs (looking at you, TikTok…assuming you’re still around in the US) and pushing each platform to provide more coverage that allows for more insight. I’m looking forward to fully embedding the best-in-class capability I’ve built within my organization, after 2023 being the year of assessment and 2024 being the year of implementation. Finally, I’m looking forward to more great opportunities to connect with our Social Intelligence Lab community members, not just at Observe Summit but throughout the year!
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