What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I am the CEO and Co-Founder of Convosphere, a global social listening agency. In my role, I steer our team to harness the power of social listening for delivering actionable insights to our clients. We use social listening to understand online conversations in over 100 languages, providing our clients with the cultural context and nuanced understanding necessary to make informed, strategic decisions. Our approach goes beyond mere translation, incorporating native language analysis to capture the true essence of global conversations and trends. While I have worked across industries - I have deep domain knowledge in pharma & healthcare social intelligence.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
My journey began in the early days of online business, before social media was the giant it is today. After launching an online business in 2002 and gaining hands-on experience in digital marketing and analytics, I pursued an MBA in International Marketing and later an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet from Oxford. My career evolved through marketing agencies and a global consulting firm, focusing on digital strategies, social listening and insights. Recognizing the gap in culturally relevant, native language social listening, I founded Convosphere to meet this global need, offering deep insights into diverse markets for our international clients.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
The project that stands out for me involved leveraging social listening to assist a global health organization in navigating the pandemic. By analyzing conversations in multiple languages, we were able to provide real-time insights into public sentiment and misinformation trends, enabling the organization to tailor its communication strategies effectively. This work not only showcased the power of social intelligence but also underscored its potential to positively impact public health and safety on a global scale.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
The biggest misconception is that social listening is just about monitoring or gathering data from social media. In reality, it's an intricate process of analysis and interpretation that provides deep, actionable insights that answer the business questions. Our work involves understanding the cultural nuances, emotional sentiments, and the subtle contexts of conversations, which requires a blend of technology and human expertise, particularly in analyzing data in the native language of the conversation.
Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)
Every client brings unique challenges, but difficulties arise when there's a misalignment in understanding the depth and strategic value of social intelligence. Clients who see social listening as a mere tool for tracking mentions without appreciating the insights it can provide into consumer behavior, market trends, and strategic planning can be challenging. The nightmare scenarios usually involve a lack of clear objectives or an underestimation of the complexity and value of native language analysis.
Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
We're continuing to focus on conducting the analysis in the native language with humans, not machine translation. This allows us to bring a level of cultural relevancy to our research alongside the integration of emotional, attitudinal, and behavioural segmentation into our social listening analysis, a practice not widely adopted in the industry. This approach allows us to offer our clients a more nuanced understanding of their audiences. With machine translation of languages, agencies can miss the opportunity to delve deeper into the cultural and emotional layers of social data, often relying on surface-level analysis that overlooks the rich insights that can be gained from a more thorough, culturally informed examination.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
My SI hero is not one individual but a collective of practitioners in the field who recognized the potential of social media as a rich data source for understanding human behavior and market trends. We’ve all come from such diverse backgrounds and experiences - being able to connect at conferences and now through organisations like the SI Lab is an incredible experience. Learning from their innovative thinking and dedication to exploring uncharted territories in social listening, human behaviour and digital analytics have inspired my journey and the ethos of Convosphere, driving us to continually push the boundaries of what social listening and insights can achieve.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
The social intelligence industry is on the cusp of a significant transformation, driven by advancements in AI and machine learning. These technologies will enable even deeper and more nuanced analysis of social data, particularly in understanding complex emotional and cultural contexts. As the industry matures, we'll see a greater integration of social intelligence with other data sources for a holistic view of consumer behavior. The focus will shift towards predictive analytics, using social data to forecast trends and behaviors, further solidifying its role as a crucial tool in strategic decision-making.
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