What does social intelligence mean to you?
Social intelligence is understanding complex human relationships, behaviors, emotions and motivations in real time, and developing actionable insights that have historically only been generated through expensive qualitative research.
For brand management, social intelligence is essential in decoding audiences, measuring brand health and staying ahead of the curve. Social intelligence enables a deep understanding of the audience sentiment essential for creating campaigns that align with different audience segments and thereby increase campaign effectiveness.
At Paramount, we focus on developing actionable insights via social intelligence whenever we launch a new show or new season to measure fan excitement, identify emerging audience segments, and understand what factors catalyze lasting connections with our content.
Ultimately, social intelligence is best utilized to transform brand messaging from a one-sided broadcast into a meaningful and genuine dialogue between audiences and brands. When you truly understand your audience everyone wins: brands engender strong affinity and the fans feel heard and valued.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
Successful social intelligence requires an exquisite blend of intuition and highly competent listening tool utilization. I believe that the most important attribute social listeners need to succeed is genuine curiosity about the subject matter they are focused on. However, even a highly motivated social listener will not succeed without a sophisticated listening tool, as collecting comprehensive feedback without such tools is nearly impossible. Technical skills are also essential for crafting and refining queries to filter out noise and focus on meaningful insights. Finally, the ability to translate data into actionable insights is equally critical, and a hallmark of social intelligence, which enables marketing and social teams to leverage insights effectively and make impactful changes to their strategies. The key is bringing all these elements together – the natural curiosity, technical expertise, and analytical skills – to create a complete picture of your audience and actionable insights for your stakeholders.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
Convincing leadership to fully embrace the value of social listening is the biggest challenge to adoption. Traditional marketers often overlook social listening as a source of valuable insight. However, when these traditional marketers do request information, their questions are often too narrowly focused, and become difficult to answer with social intelligence. This disconnect stems from a lack of understanding about the type of insights social listening can be reasonably expected to offer. By educating stakeholders and proving the value through actionable insights, we can ensure that social intelligence gets a seat at the table.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
My favorite use case for social intelligence was establishing its value by integrating social listening into the high-stakes process of selecting a new host for The Daily Show. During 2023 when rotating weekly guest hosts auditioned for the permanent host role, my team incorporated social listening into the evaluation process. While leadership initially leaned towards traditional consumer insights for feedback, we demonstrated the value of social listening by uncovering deeper, more nuanced audience insights. This was a challenging task, as most of the conversation around the show is about the news topics it covers and the sentiment is wide-ranging. To address this, we developed advanced filters to tune out irrelevant chatter and isolated audience reactions specifically to each guest host's performance and potential. Additionally, we created a scoring system that combined traditional TV ratings with the social media performance and the audience sentiment to provide the most comprehensive performance review to leadership.
This process not only informed a key strategic decision for the company, but also demonstrated that social listening is an essential tool for decision making.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
We have only begun to realize the vast potential of using social intelligence to improve business outcomes. The sky's the limit.
Beyond the traditional use of brand and campaign monitoring, social intelligence can be leveraged to analyze competitors' performance and understand what drives conversation around their brands. These insights can influence how your brand positions itself, uncovers pain points, identifies areas for improvement, and reveals unmet needs.
Social intelligence is also essential for tracking industry trends and for proactively forecasting shifts in consumer habits and tastes.
Crucially, social intelligence can also assist in monitoring potential crisis situations before they escalate, and help shape messaging during a crisis to maximize the efficacy of damage control.
At Paramount, one of the most enjoyable applications of social intelligence is to help inform creative decision making. For example, when we notice that viewers are getting invested in a certain plotline, we can suggest changes on the episodic tune-in messaging to highlight what resonated with fans, which helps both drive engagement and provides valuable insight into audience preference for the social team.
Being flexible and creative with your approach to social intelligence is critical to realizing its potential for your company, as it can be an incredibly useful way to inform and improve decision making.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
Gen AI is rapidly evolving in its abilities to process natural language and analyze vast amounts of data in a fraction of the time it would require a human. Its capabilities are improving with astonishing pace. While it’s not a substitute for human expertise and researchers are still essential for verifying insights, applying context, and crafting actionable strategies, it has proven to be an incredibly valuable tool for me to identify big conversation themes and reason behind spikes. The real value of Gen AI comes from combining the speed of AI processing with human insights derived from the processed data.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
A tool that combines AI’s natural language processing and image recognition with powerful tagging capabilities. The time savings and deeper insights generated by a tool that could automatically categorize posts based on a predefined taxonomy, differentiating, for example, between a relatable meme and a promotional message or recognize all talent/cast members featured in a post, can scarcely be overestimated. This tool could be continuously trained to improve at post recognition, and would in turn save social intelligence teams from the tedious manual tagging we currently perform, enabling us to scale-up our effort to focus on insight and strategy.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
I believe there are four crucial steps in building a social intelligence team: defining clear objectives, assembling a group of talented researchers, selecting the right tools for the task, and educating stakeholders. I would begin my team building by conducting stakeholders interviews to understand their specific needs and goals, ensuring the new team’s effort directly supports their business objectives. This information would help define the group requirements and the specific roles I would need members of the team to perform. I would search for researchers with strong analytical, technical, and communication skills, and depending on stakeholder needs, I would select the research tools the team would need to deliver excellent and timely insight. Factors like social platforms covered, sentiment analysis accuracy, quality of AI-generated insights, reporting features, ease of dashboard creation and dashboard sharing and integration with their existing systems would be critical in the selection process.
Finally, I would invest time and effort to create a data-driven culture through stakeholder education. As stakeholders gain a deeper understanding of how to use social intelligence, their ability to ask more informed and strategic questions improves, ultimately leading to more valuable insights and better utilization of the group’s social intelligence capabilities.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
I am excited by the fast-paced development in video intelligence. At Paramount, we have dedicated a significant amount of time to analyzing the User Generated Content (UGC) associated with our shows to better understand how our “superfans” engage. We explore their preferences, and specifically, which plotlines, character relationships and themes they particularly like or dislike. These insights help us improve our social content and are inspired directly by the creativity of our most enthusiastic fans. Currently, this process involves the research team finding UGC content, analyzing the videos, and summarizing their findings for stakeholders. While this type of analysis can yield valuable insights for our stakeholders, it is also very labor-intensive and allows a focus on only the highest-performing content.
Using new tools and technologies that can quickly and comprehensively understand and analyze video content, our team will be able to dive deeper and faster, and uncover more nuanced insights for our stakeholders.
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