What was your journey/career path to your current position?
Studied business and Japanese at university. Loved business, truly sucked at Japanese. Started in Business Development then after a career break (lived in Australia for a year after getting married) found research and fell in love with it. Worked for FreshMinds (now Decidedly) then Verve, before finding the courage to go it alone.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Hands down, it's got to be hearing the excitement, passion and creativity from my team.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
Despite all the amazing data we have at our fingertips, there's still so much uncertainty and that's not right.
I see social intelligence as offering a way through this - giving us certainty and inspiration. It's a chance to get closer to the people that matter to us. After all, people don't talk to researchers the way they talk to each other. This is what social has to offer.
I see social intelligence as a set of skills, tools and experiences that when applied to business challenges, creates new insight from social data that improves decision making.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
Inertia I think. We're all busy and new things take up a lot of mental calories. Things usually need to be going wrong for people to want to try something new. But I think this is slowly changing as more and more people are beginning to see the need - and realise that there's more to social intelligence than a dashboard.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
Working with market researchers more closely. It's crazy the lack of integration, knowledge transfer and collaboration between the two disciplines. Market research needs social data - it's the first new source of qual data to come along in years.
Social Intelligence needs market research's reach (to build demand) and experience (to know how to critically assess data).
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
We've designed a way to identify, understand and target different tribes of people on TikTok. It's super exciting. We deployed it late last year for a client and the results have been amazing. We'll be pushing into this more this year and helping brands make the most of this opportunity.
Internally, we've started our journey to becoming a BCorp. It's not going to be easy, but it's the right thing to do and we're all behind it.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
A mixture of opportunities and challenges.
Challenges: the first wave of social listening has passed. It's not new anymore and people expect more than superficial outcomes. We need to join up teams and share experiences. This is how we'll integrate social intelligence and drive up expectations and outcomes.
Opportunities: we've only just begun! There are some amazing tech collaborations that are raising the bar. Then there's the growing awareness that the tech is good, but the human layer is vital to create and activate the insights. The importance of social commerce will drive the need for social intelligence to help marketers drive demand in these diverse spaces.
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