What was your journey/career path to your current position?
I started out in an Australian media analysis company as a Media Researcher. The media landscape for Malaysia was very different back then in 2009 from what it is now. Main media is controlled by the government. So the news was not as 'exciting' to be analyzed back then as it is now. I was hungry to do more. One year in, my company acquired a social listening company called Brandtology and I jumped at the opportunity to jump ship. Looking back, I am glad that my initiation to social insights was with Brandtology. They had a very extensive training and career development program that enabled me to sharpen both my social analytical skills as well as selling. The social insights business was quite lean and it somehow allowed me to wear many hats as well as become commercially aware. They figured out the science as well as the art of selling the right social insights solutions to the right stakeholders. I did some really exciting work there for global and local brands; private companies as well as the government. Towards the end of my ten-year stint, we started marrying methods: combining social listening and traditional market research methodologies. Fun times!
My next move was to join an ad agency, as I was curious to learn how insights can cohesively translate into action, be it a successful campaign, or a seamless customer journey experience. I have access to so many tools and resources here, but more often than not, social insights was always my go-to. This presented me with the opportunity to combine it with other forms of research to derive more holistic insights.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
One of the research projects that I had worked on with my team won three Golds at the 2019 Global AMEC awards in Prague. This was huge for so many reasons. One, it was a homegrown modest Muslim fashion brand winning a global award for media measurement. Two, for this particular project, majority of the research was primarily driven by social listening, and winning an award for a huge social listening project proves that social intelligence can definitely stand toe-to-toe with other research methodologies. But most of all, I'm proud because the team who worked on this little project was a team of home-based female-only analysts, which comprised of working mothers who had to previously quit the workforce to care for their children, those who sacrificed careers to care for aging parents, or even those living in remote areas who never had the career opportunities living in a big city would present. This was way before the pandemic, when WFH was not even a thing, and employers believed that working from home was simply unproductive. Which is a shame because, we would miss out on harnessing the intelligence of so many women, who represent half of the audience our industry is meant to understand and analyse. This win proves that supporting women to find a work-life balance is not just practical for a social intelligence business; it could actually help that business thrive.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
If you wanted to learn how an animal hunts, do you observe them in a zoo, or in the jungle? Social intelligence provides you with the ability to observe and learn about your audience in their natural habitat. It's an unprompted, unfiltered, real-time, 24/7 source of intelligence, at a scale beyond most traditional market research. If you are trying to help a product, service or policy connect to people, the role of social intelligence in understanding these people cannot be ignored.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
A lot of marketers see social intelligence as merely social media reporting or a tool to help community managers monitor brands' social pages. Which is ashame, because it's so much more than that. Brands are in the business of delivering value to people. By having a finger on the pulse on these people, you are able to get valuable insights that can help inspire every aspect of your business: marketing, new product development, proactive crisis management, stakeholder communications, service and operations redesign, as well as identifying untapped white spaces. Simply put: social intelligence is the window to innovating your business.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
As someone who appreciates and values all methods of research, I do feel that by seeing sources of data and intelligence in silos (be it from social intelligence, customer relationship data or traditional market research), we're missing out on a huge opportunity. Social intelligence has the ability to co-exist and complement other forms of intelligence. For instance, the scale and unprompted nature of social intelligence gives you the ability to unearth valuable context that might inform research questions in an upcoming focus group or survey. It works the other way around too: social intelligence might help you understand the 'why' behind patterns of data in a quantitative study, and might help you validate an observation from a smaller scale qualitative study. After all, human beings are complex, multi-faceted creatures. Much like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, integrating social intelligence with other methodologies (your different 'blind men') gives you the ability to have a truly holistic view of your audience. Social intelligence can help give context to your existing insights.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
I recently joined Media.Monks here in South East Asia, where I'm the Data and Insights Lead. I'd be looking at establishing proper insights practice, which integrates social intelligence with other forms of research, as well as looking at growing a team.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
As more marketers see the vital role social intelligence plays in all aspects of the business, they will then see that in order to truly harness the power of social intelligence, we shouldn't be just focusing on getting the right tools or building the right keyword lists; it should also be on getting the right human intelligence. We need curious individuals who have a hunger to understand the humanity hidden in the data; those who are relentless at unearthing deeper, insightful meaning in observations. Which means, investing in the human intelligence behind social intelligence, through the right training programmes and career development initiatives would be extremely vital to our industry's future.
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