What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
My official title is Founder & CEO, but I consider myself to be a strategic insights consultant. My work is centred around analysing consumer behaviours and market trends, and transforming them into data-driven business strategies.
I use social listening to provide my clients with detailed research and insights reports, and then leverage those insights to guide their strategic decision making. Social listening helps me to guide my clients in making well-informed decisions regarding their marketing strategy, product development, and how they engage with customers. It's about listening to the voice of the customer at scale and translating that into actionable intelligence.
Social listening is the most integral tool in my data stack, I love its inherent unsolicited nature and believe it to be one the most valuable resources in getting to the heart of consumers.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
My social listening journey started whilst working at social intelligence platform, Brandwatch. It was here I discovered the potential of social listening and the value it can have on corporate decision making. This spurred me on to start Ten Bear Group, with the aim to help companies maximise the use of their social and consumer data.
When I first started Ten Bear 7 years ago, there was a significant gap in the market where there was little support in being able to leverage the insights gleaned from social data in a strategic way. My aim was to bridge that gap by democratising social intelligence and helping brands of all sizes leverage their insights to make a tangible, strategic difference to their business.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
I am particularly proud of our work with the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC). They are an alliance of 15 leading UK humanitarian charities such as the British Red Cross and Save the Children, who come together to raise funds quickly at times of crisis overseas.
The DEC initially approached us with an urgent need for real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities to enhance their national fundraising appeals. The nature of their work required our team to develop a solution that could provide immediate support in times of crisis and each project allowed us only 12 hours notice to set up and start providing real-time monitoring, daily reporting, and alerts. We also enhanced this process by integrating other data sources, such as Google Analytics, to track conversations about appeal broadcasts on television networks such as the BBC, influencer and KOL participation, and member agency posts, allowing us to directly correlate them to donation uplift.
Longer term we designed and implemented a social listening framework to guide each appeal's strategy which they could action in-house. Our work not only influenced the DECs fundraising capabilities, but also directly impacted the efforts of 15 other charities, resulting in higher appeal engagement and an increase in donations.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
The biggest misconception about my work lies in underestimating the depth of analysis and the strategic value that our insights can provide to a business beyond mere social media monitoring.
Many people think that social listening is just monitoring social media for brand mentions, customer complaints, or sentiment. While tracking mentions and sentiment is a key part of social listening, the scope of what we do is much broader and more strategic. Our research uncovers key insights about consumer behaviour, market trends, competitor strategies, and more. It’s not just about vanity metrics, there is a vast amount of unstructured data available which can be used to inform business strategies, product development, marketing campaigns, and customer service improvements to name a few.
Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)
I don’t think I’ve ever had what you would consider a ‘nightmare’ client, however I have worked on a number of incredibly difficult research and insights requests that I would consider to be more challenging than the average!
Some of these projects involved navigating through vast amounts of data to find insights within extremely tight deadlines or dealing with highly sensitive topics where the margin for error was virtually nonexistent. Additionally, there were instances where the client expectations were exceedingly high, requiring not just the identification of insights but also the prediction of market trends with a high degree of accuracy.
While these projects were demanding and required some innovative approaches to social listening, they also provided valuable learning experiences, pushing me and my team to enhance our skills and refine our methodologies to meet and exceed the challenges.
Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
I have been working with brands to integrate social intelligence with other consumer and customer data sources. I have found that this gives a more in-depth contextualised view of their insights and encourages marketing and customer success teams to work more closely. Integrating all these data sources means we can identify more nuanced trends and patterns that might not be visible through social data alone.
In addition to this, I believe there is a significant missed opportunity in not leveraging social listening for predictive analysis. Traditionally brands use social data reactively rather than proactively, responding to trends, mentions, or sentiment shifts as they occur. However, by applying more advanced analytics to historical social data they are able to anticipate changes in behaviours and emerging trends proactively.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
Actually, my colleague Becca Evans is who I would call a Social Intelligence hero. Becca's knack for identifying trends among some of the most complex social data projects I've seen to date, along with her creative application of these insights, truly distinguishes her in the field of SI. Her insights into human behaviour and her strategic use of social data have not only enhanced our team's projects but have also led to significant breakthroughs in our research methodologies. Her contributions go beyond mere data analysis; she has a unique talent for turning insights into actionable strategies that have had a huge impact on our clients who are also consistently impressed by her work.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
I think the advent of AI is already making a significant impact on the social intelligence industry and will continue to do so in the coming years. Initially, I was apprehensive that AI technology might undermine the value of research agencies like ours but I’ve come to realise that there is nothing that can replace the human touch in understanding context, cultural nuances, and the subtleties of human emotion and language.
AI excels in identifying patterns and predicting behaviours from social data, but it is the strategic thinking and contextual understanding of humans that transform this data into actionable business intelligence. I think the role of human analysts will shift towards leveraging these insights to craft innovative strategies and make informed decisions, using AI to make their time to insight faster and more accurate.
Agencies and social listening managers alike, who embrace this technology and combine it with strategic human insight will lead the industry.
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