Has the perception of social intelligence changed within your organisation since you won last year’s SI Insider 50? If so, how?
This recognition has illustrated to our leadership that we are recognized in the industry as subject matter experts and has allowed our team to add credibility to our team both internally and externally.
What’s the most interesting social listening project you’ve worked on in the last year?
I have the honor to lead a team of social intelligence professionals, so my most interesting projects is supporting these individuals in their research. Not to mention, working with them to pioneer new ways to conduct research leveraging social data.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
I am continually asking “but why?” this helps me never settle, and to always think about how to continue research or was to merge data sets to tell a more compelling / informative story. This has served me well over the years when it comes to building and now leading the social intelligence practice at Microsoft.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
I have a background in social media publishing and measurement, along with digital marketing. These skills have assisted me in the social intelligence field by understand where research meets impact. I can put myself in my stakeholder’s shoes, and this allows me to create a story that resonates and can impact their line of business.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
Our team is positioned within a research team, so I have witnessed firsthand the difference and the power of social vs primary research. There are three main differentiations I have witnessed. The first is speed. The speed of which you can analyze social is hours and not weeks/months like it is in primary research. Secondly, the size and scale of the sample. In primary research you are constrained by the sample size, but with social the constraint is the query and audience segmentation we are using to pull the data. We constantly have a much larger sample size than our primary counterparts. Lastly and maybe most importantly, the data is unaided. Which allows for us to continually position our data as a authentic voice of the customer. This makes our data more digestible because we can remove some of our respondent biases, and we can customers at the center of our research.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
This is an easy one, my team makes it fun to come in a work with them every day. They are continually pushing me to be a better research and manager. The other is, no two days are the same, we have different and interesting questions to answer every day across our amazing organization.
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