How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I started my career as a journalist but quickly switched to opinion and market research to better understand the psychological, social and political motivations of various stakeholders, and, as a result, better inform decisions and define strategies. E-reputation was emerging at that time (social intelligence did not exist then!) and I immediately used it as a key method, along with qual and quant research within the agencies I was working for (Occurrence, Ipsos...). And as the social web was about to disrupt our social life, it became central in my professional life; the Insider 50 challenge made me realize that out of my 20 years of career, the last ones 13 had been mostly dedicated to social intelligence - from pioneering and shaping new social research methods with my start-up partners at Linkfluence in the early 2010s to designing global programs and democratizing insights within big corporations such as Moët Hennessy, SNCF and now Pernod Ricard.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Probably what I am currently dedicated to: pushing consumer-centricity to the next level at Pernod Ricard by leveraging and customizing several 'martech' platforms (such as advertising and innovation testing platforms and, of course, social listening tools to track our new products or campaigns' resonance for instance) to empower our marketing community - and beyond!
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
It's actually a no brainer at Pernod Ricard! Social data are omnipresent but rarely used as an isolated source of data in our business decision-making process. We generally bridge or mix social data to other sources of data (declarative or passive for instance) to derive specific insights or global learnings.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
There are for sure many ways and topics! Let me mention a social intelligence project we launched in 2021 and that will gain momentum in 2022: the exploration and tracking of local sensitivity to sustainability and responsibility topics within our key markets to feed our brands strategies!
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
The organisational buy-in is often linked to the clarity and the value we bring with insights. Therefore, answering a business question with a strong storytelling based on social data (and any other relevant complementary sources of data) is probably how social intelligence can shine.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Social intelligence should be accessible to anyone within an organization wishing to democratize insights. Yet, it does not necessarily imply that all users should be accomplished social data researchers. Let's define and share relevant use cases, with simple KPIs and clear insights to simply reach and engage a variety of internal stakeholders.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
Social listening use cases are often too limited to crisis monitoring and performance tracking. Show casing exploratory use cases on strategic cultural and societal issues to feed brand and corporate strategies will be key to unlock the potential of social intelligence.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
Social intelligence is a very accessible, versatile and now mature way to help democratizing insights within your teams and enlightening their strategies to become a more human-centric company.
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