What does social intelligence mean to you?
For me, it’s the practice of leveraging technology to analyse social (conversational and audience) and digital data (performance). There is still a lot of emphasis placed on the technology, and rightfully so, but in the end, it does come down to the individual and their knack for understanding and leveraging data to make insights actionable.
On a more personal level, social and digital intelligence has opened the world for me (literally). From starting a new team in a new field as lockdown hit us, to working for one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. I’m extremely passionate about the digital intelligence field and what it allows us to achieve.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
Obviously they need a strong understanding of the social and digital landscape. It’s so much more than just vanity metrics and share of voice. It comes down to the ability to actually synthesise the data and contextualise it for your stakeholders to understand and to take action from.
Secondly, they need to get their hands dirty. This is probably still old-school thinking and there is a lot of theory around the practice nowadays but historically you had to really invest your time in platforms to understand what is actually capable.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
I think the biggest challenge is to show the value of what you’re doing. It’s not as clearcut as performance marketing where you can highlight ROI or ROAS. You really need to prove yourself (or it feels like that). Also think another challenge is to where to begin and what to actually do with all this data that’s being gathered. Once you’ve managed to build that use case building out what you’re trying to solve, adoption should follow naturally (maybe I’m over-simplifying it).
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
My favourite use cases are usually around crisis situations as that’s when the kitchen really gets hot and a lot of people are depending on the information you have to share. We mitigated significant brand risk this year by having a thorough plan of action for listening, alerts, as well as external and internal statements. Meticulous scenario planning and mapping out all the possible angles something could unfold really helped us to prepare for what’s to come and make informed decisions as soon as something happens.
Secondly, it comes back to the contextualisation of data. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the audiences behind the conversations. Mapping out all the different audiences that could potentially talk about our brand and understanding our perception amongst them. This has helped us to create solutions to understand overall brand reputation as well as creating bespoke dashboards to understand patient and prescriber journeys for our brand and products.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
It comes back to use cases for me. Trying to understand the specific needs of your stakeholders and building out example dashboards or reports that answer their research and/or business questions. There is nothing worse than a data dump, and by trying to pin point specific answers to questions also helps you to challenge yourself in your setups and the way you present and tell the data story.
There’s also the proactive side of it. Don’t wait for the brief. Being in this field you need to understand broader macro trends and how that could affect your brand and customers. By anticipating possible scenarios and having that data as soon as something happens really positions you as a trusted source of truth.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
Personally I feel it’s a bit of both. When ChatGPT hit us, AI was literally force-fed from every possible angle. By exploring the hype you can clearly see the need for it and it does become useful. I still feel that we as the experts can build better queries than what AI is suggesting (or maybe we’re just perfectionists), but for someone who’s just starting out it does become super helpful.
Where is does become helpful is with digesting massive volumes of data to help contextualise the conversation. We’re getting quicker to insights with the help of AI. We’ve trained models to help us understand how our audiences are talking about our products. This goes for Adverse Event detection but also understanding whether there are any shortages of our products or not. For me, just like social and digital intelligence, it comes down to the marriage of tech and talent. AI for me is an extension of the team and sometimes a good sparring partner to bounce ideas off.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
For LinkedIn data 😀
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
Make sure you have senior stakeholder involvement as a sponsor for social listening so that you can invest in technology and people.
Secondly would be to acquire said technology. It doesn’t have to be the biggest contract our there, but just start somewhere and build out those use cases by showing the power of social intelligence.
Thirdly, invest in people. It’s the people that make it happen. Going on an intelligence journey as a small team is super powerful. And leverage the stakeholder buyin mentioned in step one. This is key!
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
In the end of year mashup I mentioned that I’m simply looking forward to continue on this journey.
The last two year brought a lot of change and we all managed to navigate that pretty well. I think 2025 will hold in similar change for us if we take a look at how the digital landscape is evolving.I’m also looking forward to continue to build innovative solutions and menthods to help centralise data and democratising access to insights within our company. I would like to see it as the year for even more scale and growth #FingersCrossed
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