How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I began in social very traditionally, through content management and production in the third sector. Then once I made the move to the private sector and I had more of a need for a budget I very quickly learned that I could get a budget If I could supply some interesting insight and data.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Getting a large DTC brand to care about social insight! Not only did ASOS adopt social intelligence but gave me the freedom to explore how this data and insight could impact all areas of the business. Some specific highlights are our Influencer selection tool, benchmarking methodology, consumer events analysis and AI image analysis.
How is your organization using social data to support business decision-making?
Social insight is used for in Marketing/campaign planning, e.g. Black Friday and other sale moments as well as influencer activity and TIkTok paid media activations. As well as social NPS, UX and UI and product/brands.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
Most recently social intelligence has been combined with various other data sets to create a more holistic voice of the customer analysis, to broaden the use case and giving the data set more credibility.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
Starting small, pick an area where SI can help and showcase the business value early, this will get people onboard and help you to grow the function. It is also a slow burn, businesses are slow to pick up new sources, so combining with more established data sets such as NPS and surveys help.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Take people on the journey with SI with you, and learn other disciplines that could compliment SI.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
Longer form content - Reddit; image analysis - AI; competitor analysis.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
So many brands want/claim to be consumer centric, SI is one of the closest ways to get consumer insight quickly and easily. For a small outlay, its value is immeasurable.
Get Social with SILab
