How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
In my 14 year career to date post finishing my degree, data and insights have been at the core of my interests and skillset, which looking back I feel have led me to where I am today – championing the use of varied data sources to create a more holistic view and harness deeper insights towards categories, consumers, competitors or customers.
My most recent role at Colart as Global Insight Director, has particularly accelerated my evolution of relying on social intelligence more and more to bring a richer perspective of insights into a wide variety of business issues and contexts, where I can now confidently see myself evangelizing the use of social intelligence.
I started my career in a direct marketing business in 2008, supporting Sky in new customer acquisition campaigns, where quite early on my fluency in data and analytics gave me the opportunity to help the business manage the campaigns more effectively. In 2012, I was offered an opportunity to work for GfK, a globally renowned market research operation serving brands and retailers in several categories such as Automotive, DIY and various other sectors. This role cemented my interests in developing a career in data and insights, where consulting and presenting to clients on market and industry trends to affirm/channel their commercial and business strategies felt extremely fulfilling.
Sensing an opportunity to move to the other side of the table where I could use these insights to create change within the organizational strategy, I moved to a client side Insight role at Hanesbrands UK in 2016, where I helped setup their local category insight capabilities. This is where my horizons into discovering the wide variety of data sources, research methods and insight tools really advanced, and also gave me a first foray into social intelligence, which was beginning to gather pace as analytics made this rich data source more accessible to harness insights.
In 2018, I was offered the opportunity to to help setup group level insights and research capabilities at my current employer Colart, and this has arguably the most developing and rewarding role I have had in my career to date, and where I really began to harness the value of social intelligence, among others – to provide deeper and richer insights to solve business issues and create value.
And finally, after a near 5 year stint at Colart, I am now eagerly looking forward to my next opportunity, joining John Lewis Partnership as a Measurement and Tracking Lead in their Data, Insight and Analytics function, and hope to continue to bring my experience to add value to my new employer.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
I have been fortunate to work for employers with cultures promoting trust, openness, fresh thinking, heathy conflict and above all visions to inspire change, which I feel are all qualities I have imbibed to give me the success I have enjoyed so far.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
A skill that I feel I have sharpened with time but one that I would call has been the most influential in my career to date, has been the ability to synthesize complexity into simplicity – turning into the “so what” actions to drive change in the organization.
Alongside this, harnessing influence with stakeholders around me to create common goals and collective opportunities to drive change or add value is also something I regard as a key skill for me, and something I continue to be mindful of in developing moving forwards.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
Delivering on the trust stakeholders rely on me and my team as trusted consultants that bring deeper insights to their issues or opportunities is what gets me eager to work on a daily basis. We live in a world with constant information overload, and providing clarity and confidence of action to focus on the things that matter, is what I thrive on achieving.
Social intelligence has been one of those special yet still underutilized streams that have helped me and my team get an edge on to help solve business issues or discover new opportunities, and in the connected world we live in, I believe this will be an avenue I will continue to utilize more in the future, and well as see my team using more and more of in their mission to add value.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
Social data for me is a perfect embodiment of “Big Qual” – that can be harnessed relatively quickly, cheaply and provide deeper and new insights compared to traditional methodologies. Granted there are gaps in the data around representation and coverage, as well as the underdeveloped insight capabilities and over emphasized visualization and analytics in this area, but I have been fortunate to work on use cases and projects with extremely talented and resourceful individuals, who have helped me and my team get unchartered insights from this data and has seen us deliver greater than promised insight value to our business stakeholders.
What does being a social intelligence evangelist mean in the context of your work?
Championing the use of social intelligence as a credible data source to provide deeper and fresh insights for a wide variety of business use cases and challenges, as well as continually developing both internal and pushing for greater external capabilities to help extract greater value from this data – where again I have the support of several industry leaders to count on their support towards.
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