How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I ended up in social intelligence mainly due to luck and timing, although thankfully I was prepared for the opportunity when it found me! In early 2014 I had recently completed my undergraduate program and was working for Disney Parks in a Management Internship. I had previously completed a Disney College Program as well as two non-Disney social media internships while completing my Bachelors in Business. I loved working for Disney, but I knew I wanted to get into a marketing role, ideally something where I could use my social media experience. As it so happened, this was the time when Disney Parks, along with many other companies, were making the decision to bring social intelligence capabilities in-house. I applied to an open analyst position, and what it really came down to was an amazing woman named Kadee Kochanski, who took a chance on me. I didn't have any experience with research and analytics at the time, let alone social intelligence specifically. She thought my prior Disney roles and social media background would help me learn this new area, and that she could teach me the rest of what I needed to know. I'm so grateful to her for giving me a start in this amazing field.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
There have honestly been so many, most of which I unfortunately can't share because they are confidential! However, one project that I'm sure many people are familiar with is our Star Wars Galaxy‚'s Edge expansions, major theme park land additions that opened back in 2019. I was a task force member for these openings in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World, as part of an amazing cross-functional team of research and insights professionals. We supported the successful launch of these brand-new worlds through a combination of approaches that included quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Social intelligence helped the team validate and size emerging themes we were gathering from conversations with Guests in the parks, and this was happening in near real-time. My team was able to detect operational problems to fix, identify the biggest wins, and provide insight for future marketing efforts. Many of our Guests had an incredibly emotional experience when visiting Galaxy's Edge for the first time; there were adults that were moved to tears that they had the opportunity to step into their favorite Star Wars stories and got the chance to live the experience rather than just watch. It was incredibly special to be a part of that.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
We have many different use cases for social intelligence, I'd say the most common requests my team gets are measuring brand awareness, product performance, or marketing effectiveness. One of the interesting things about social intelligence is that for any single product or event, there are actually numerous approaches and points in time where you could do analysis, each of which changes the insights you can get. My team gets pulled in at many different points in time, and that timing greatly impacts the insights we provide. Social intelligence can be used to inform segmentation and identify target markets at the very beginning. Or, before a new product, campaign or event is even created for these markets, we can listen to relevant social conversations and share those insights with our creative teams to make sure they are making something for our Consumers that reflects their values and unmet needs. Once a product is made, we can listen to social conversations right at the beginning of a launch to understand Consumers overall likes/dislikes, whether they would recommend the product to a friend, or see if we can make any quick changes for improvement. My team can also look into what questions are being asked and find areas of confusion among consumers, those insights can be used to tailor our marketing messages to make sure they are addressing frequently asked questions. We could also do our analysis at the very end of the process, effectively giving a post-mortem on whether or not we think a product was successful. All of the insights we gathered along the way can also be rolled into future creative endeavors. Essentially social intelligence can fit in at multiple points in the go-to-market model. My team has applied all of these use-cases, and more, to support business decision making in our organization!
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
My goal will be to push my team to find new innovative applications of social intelligence for the company, as well as expand our coverage with the businesses we already support. One approach that I'd like to use more is category-level analysis. This is a methodology where our team queries and performs an exploratory analysis on a very broad topic beyond our business, for example, all theme park-related social media conversations, or even all vacation related conversations. This can also be applied to relevant businesses like Food & Beverage, or Resorts & Hotels. I want us to help our partners learn more about what consumers like and dislike most about participating in these categories as a whole. We can identify pain points and opportunities to improve that we might otherwise miss if we were only listening to our own brand. I also want our team to make time for more broad, trend-related analysis and weak signal detection. Social media can be used to find indicators that consumers are shifting in their values or behavior, these discoveries will allow us to future-proof our brand. I'm pleased to share that I had two new people join my team this January, and with their help, as well as my social intelligence lead, Nicole Hindes, I know we are going to do some big things in 2022.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
I think that almost any organization can get started in the social intelligence space, no matter how small! To get started someone in a research or analytics function with interest in the space can take on a dual role. The volume of data scales with the size of the business, so while I may be dealing with millions of posts each month at the Walt Disney Company, smaller organizations may only need to deal with thousands, or hundreds. An organization that's new to social intelligence can figure out how many people they need based on data volume, their business questions, and how much support they are getting from social intelligence tools or vendors. I recommend any company just jump in and make an investment, no matter how small. You can prove out the value of social intelligence over time, but in the meantime, there is a plethora of untapped, valuable data not being used. My team has worked on a variety of projects that decreased costs or increased revenue, and when you can tie your work back to saving or making money for your company, you can make the case for more resources. As I've already pointed out, there are so many use cases that any company will find at least a few that apply to their work.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Think big and don't get comfortable! Social media is not just a place to connect with friends, family, and acquaintances. People are using online platforms to start major societal movements, they are establishing opinions about life, finding like-minded groups to join, and increasingly, they are using social media to inform and make purchase decisions. These decisions are often influenced by the posts they see in their timeline, and not necessarily from brands. Increasingly, people are being influenced to make large purchases, such as buying a car or taking a vacation, based off of something as simple as an Instagram post from a friend. The use cases for social intelligence are extremely broad and they continue to grow and evolve as the social media landscape grows and evolves. As professionals in this space, we can't get complacent and keep doing things as we've always done, we need to stay up to date on new platforms, as well as the new ways our consumers may start using social media.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
I would love to see social intelligence become a larger part of research organizations, so that it can be a go-to for better decision making and understanding consumers. I also hope that there will be increasing use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that will allow us to analyze the massive amounts of data we deal with quickly and easily. Social media continues to grow in terms of users world-wide, and it's evolved to be more visual and more long-form. That creates an interesting problem for researchers because it's an abundance of data in volume and it's increasingly complex. We also need image recognition/classification tools and the skill sets to deploy them embedded in the teams we build. This will get us access to all the social media posts that contain images, but aren't labeled or hashtagged with the topics they contain. I think AI/ML applications will play a large and necessary role in any social intelligence team in the future.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
Like any type of research, social intelligence has key differentiators from other data sources. I think the biggest selling point when it comes to social intelligence is the speed to insight. When I get asked a question by my leadership, I can get an answer for them in hours or days as opposed to weeks or months. When you compare the time a social intelligence study takes to set up to a survey, where you need to design, program, get sample, field, etc. beginning to end it's going to take 10x longer than a social listening study will. Some of our most impactful work has been in cases where my team was able to provide an early read on something when no other data source was available. Another great thing about social intelligence is that it provides an unfiltered perspective into our consumers lives. It is information they are sharing willingly, without directly interfacing with a brand or researcher. One other aspect that makes social intelligence unique is the ability to analyze competitive data. Most people don't realize when it comes to consumer conversations in social media, you have the same access to your competitor's data as you do your own, it's an even playing field of publicly available social media posts. All of these unique qualities lend credence to why social intelligence should be used in growth strategies.
Get Social with SILab
