What was your journey/career path to your current position?
I'm a startup guy who accidentally stumbled into the social listening industry. While at an email & collaboration startup, my former manager was leading marketing for a group called Techrigy. He provided me with the unique opportunity to build a sales team. Techrigy was a freemium service that was generating between 50-100 organic sign-ups a day. Within 6 months, Techrigy was featured and credited on Techcrunch, Buzzfeed, CNN, and NYTimes as the source that provided major news outlets the social media data of the impact of Sully landing the American Airlines flight on the Hudson. This was one of the first culturally relevant moments, where Twitter was at the center of a breaking story. Soon after, we were acquired by Alterian and I brought out data into the world's largest agency groups and leading ESPs. From there, I oversaw our data lead journalism offerings, working with global marketing to target entertainment, politics & B2B technology trends.
In 2011, I saw the opportunity to lead up a social media practice touching all aspects of engagement, moving beyond just listening and intelligence and expanding into community, paid, organic, and custom technologies. During that time, I was introduced to Giles & Seb at Brandwatch. I realized I needed to join the team to help launch their business in the Americas. I loved my time at Brandwatch, scaling both the sales organization leading Agency & Partners; as well as, being a major part of our culture in the US as we grew from a few million to a hundred million dollar behemoth. I exited soon after the merger with Crimson Hexagon in 2018 and jumped supply side with Socialgist. I was recruited to lead up partnerships & marketing, working closely with industry leaders to accelerate the adoption of audience-centric datasets like Reddit, Quora & Tumblr.
Dealing daily with the industry leaders in the social intelligence market, as well as, traditional analytics leaders focused on driving the adoption of the utilization of datasets. In the last year, I was recruited by Access Intelligence PLC to help scale their efforts in North America and build global partnership programs at Pulsar. The journey has been a trip so far and I love the opportunity I've had to be an insider & connector the whole time.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
I've had the opportunity to work with some amazing companies in my journey with social data so it's hard to limit to just one. So I'll highlight a couple of outstanding 'WHOA!' moments that happened. Brandwatch - With Brandwatch, it seemed like every major brand and agency was our client so the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl was a roller coaster of excitement, mid-January clients would start to ask general questions on if measuring X is possible, or what support would be available if they needed to do some real-time engagement. For 4 years, Super Bowl Sunday was a work requirement. I spent the day triaging whatever issues would arise with data processing or analyzing if Twitter was up with moments like dunking Oreo's in the dark. It totally felt as if I was in the center of the internet and was a significant part of the cogs that made the advertising world move.
Socialgist - At Socialgist, my proudest achievement was working with the team at Quora to bring our solution to market. When you think about social networks, you often think of faceless VC-funded ivory towers. Well, come to find out they are all just really smart and caring individuals. With Quora we did many firsts: coordinating content, PR Outreach, and defining a world-class launch.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
For me since the beginning, it's always been about the audience, the community, and the people and that is the power of Social Intelligence. You have the ability to look at any moment, any engagement, any moment of time and re-construct that behavior to understand the who, what, when, where, and why.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
It's consistently been moving beyond just counting things (reach, shares, tweets, reach‚ etc) and shifting towards treating it like data that has attributes. The toolkit needs help in this aspect, but also the practitioner needs to challenge its capabilities.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
Getting stuck on the completeness of vs. insights discovery. Social media technologies have so many use-cases that they serve incompletely, if users pressured their platform providers to focus on a single job first and expand into multiple jobs there would be a much larger opportunity to deliver unrivaled insights and findings that can truly drive organizational change.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organization in 2022?
2022 is going to be exciting seeing that I've moved from an advisory role to leading sales & marketing for Blackbird.AI. My core focus is to evangelize our mission which will is helping Brands identify, measure, and mitigate risks caused by MDM (Misinformation, Disinformation &  Malinformation) and implement technology and consulting-based solutions to protect themselves going forward.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
I'm a big fan of shifting back to basics. Define a use-case and prove its value, from those validated use-cases shift into adjacent use-cases to drive long-standing organizational value and adoption.
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