What was your journey/career path to your current position?
I’ve been working in online insights since pre-social media. I had launched an online business back in 2002 and got hands-on experience with digital marketing and analytics, before getting my MBA in International Marketing. I worked at marketing agencies providing digital marketing strategies, implementation and measurement. As social media arrived, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, I worked with businesses, entrepreneurs and bloggers to implement and measure campaigns and events to measure the impact on the intended audience. I then moved to a global management consulting firm, which specialised in Pharma & Life sciences, first accelerating their internal digital transformation then creating their external offering of social insights. After building that offering, growing a team and clients – I realised there was a real global need for delivering deep insights with the social listening and analysis in the local language by native speakers who could also bring in cultural relevance. Therefore I launched Convosphere to address this challenge and we now work in over 70 languages for our global clients.
What’s your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Having set up Convosphere as a hybrid business model, with some of our team in office and the rest spread across the globe, it was imperative we built the right team. I’m proud to say we’ve built an incredibly talented team that has allowed us to build and scale the business while retaining our company culture. Powered by inquisitiveness, empathy and an entrepreneurial spirit, I’m proud of how our teams’ shared intellectual values and team culture have lead us to co-create innovative solutions for our clients even while we are all working remotely. Having this cohesive and empowered team meant we had a successful system in place to ensure we were not only able to meet our clients’ needs during the pandemic but also increased what we were able to deliver. We grew our team, client base and word of mouth reputation with how we delivered timely and impactful actionable insights and recommendations in a challenging work environment.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
Where “Social Listening” is the process of using online conversation to answer business questions with actionable insight; “Social Intelligence” is the application of using social listening insights and recommendations to making data-driven decisions. One of the great things about social intelligence, is that it’s a data-driven approach. This means that your first project can serve as a benchmark and you can therefore subsequently measure the success of any actions then taken or not taken in a meaningful way, which could be either qualitative or quantitative, or both.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
Not all clients are at the same level of the social intelligence maturity model so they don’t always understand how deep you can go with this research and how impactful and strategic the insights can and should be. They also aren’t always aware of what they are asking for or ensuring all the right stakeholders from their organization are informed or involved. It’s really important to ensure the stakeholders share a similar level of understanding of the business requirements and remit to action the insights once delivered – and most importantly, that the business question and objectives are aligned and can be answered or informed with social intelligence.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
I think the biggest missed opportunity is when organisations don’t do the social listening, analysis and insight generation in the native language of the market – or decide to just get the English data from a market that isn’t predominantly English speaking. Related to that is if this is done using machine translation or automated translation – so much of the context can be lost as well as the cultural relevancy which can reveal market-specific insights, opportunities or critical issues.
What’s on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
This year there will be a focus on expansion. Although we already have 9 offices globally, we are planning to expand our footprints in the U.S. and APAC to further support our clients. We are focusing on developing some of our methodologies into tools to help increase team efficiency and reporting capabilities while also adding further layers of emotional, attitudinal and behavioural segmentation to our work. We’re also expanding our influencer network mapping capabilities beyond traditional social networks and how messages spread across communities. We’re working on partnering with more Market Research and Management Consultancy firms, to provide our social intelligence as a pillar which supports their primary research. Lastly, we’re doing more speaking events and providing education on how strategic social intelligence can deliver impact for our Enterprise clients on both internal and external business challenges.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
We’re already seeing many clients move from having social intelligence as an add-on or a nice to have, to a need to have or standalone piece of research. This has been happening as organisations increase their social intelligence maturity and in many ways I think this has also been accelerated by challenges in primary research presented by the pandemic. There’s a growing expectation that social intelligence should be made to work alongside traditional market research. We’ve also seen a shift in awareness and acceptance of the importance of local social media channels as a data source rather than an overreliance on Facebook and Twitter. From a methodological perspective as we go beyond traditional sentiment analysis to the emotional we are able to develop more nuanced and impactful insights into audience or segments’ attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.
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