How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I had the pleasure of managing the Recreational Equipment Incorporated (Or more commonly known as REI Co-op) brand handles which was my first role in the social media space. I thoroughly enjoy working on a brand with such loyal fans. While there I was an early adopter to social intelligence to help educate our brand/product managers on what products and brands users were excited about in social media. This allowed them to be more strategic with products ads and placements.
This fueled my passion for social intelligence and my passion to leverage social to answer business questions with the authentic voice of the customer. Fast forwards 2.5 years I found a role at another large northwest brand Microsoft for a role on their Social Intelligence Practice or SIP as it is referred to internally. I was able to join the team and only focus on delivering social intelligence to brand marketers, engineers, product managers and executives. I have been impressed by this team and the advocacy we have been able to build within the company of my last 5.5 years. 5 months ago, I had the pleasure of taking over leadership of the team and it strategy in this evolution of the program.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
My favorite achievement to date was bine a part of REI's first OptOutside campaign. For those who are unaware this campaign was designed to have ALL of our retail stores shut down on Black Friday in the US which is the largest shopping day of the year, so that our employees could take the day and enjoy it outside with friends or family. This really put the brand in a people over profit position and I had the district pleasure of executing this campaign in the brand social channels. It was one of those moments in your career you knew to your core you were doing something different than any other brand.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
Out team is positioned in the Research + Insight's org with Marketing so this allows our team to get involved in primary research and social lead research across the company from brand marketers, engineers, product managers and executives. Not to mention we have become the gold standard internally for query library which to date is 4,500+ for anyone in the company to leverage.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
We are looking to expand our reach out team, which has nearly double in size and so has our core remits. The team will continue to focus on building a best-in-class social intelligence practice as well as continually evolve in data to storytelling both internally and externally to Microsoft.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
What has worked well for the SIP team at Microsoft is to understand and dig upfront for the business questions or hypotheses. This has allowed our team to meet our stakeholders where they are and to support them with the authentic voice of the customer. We have also started to focus our attention in metric generation to support primary research trackers to allow for faster, more affordable alternatives to legacy reporting in between flights. This has allowed our data to be less sporadic and more informative, which is more approachable for some of our stakeholders. Others love the quick turn pace we can turn around a robust research project to help them with a product brief, marketing plan or executive readout. Both have assisted our team to gain more adoption and buy-in long term.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Stay true to the findings. It is often easier to change the tone and or findings to tell the narrative your stakeholders are looking for. We are just the stewards of this data, and we are sharing an unaided version of the voice of the customer. If your stakeholders are turned away by the results you may need to reframe the business question to support them from a different angle, but always stand by the voice of the customers.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
More data sources! We are asked weekly when we will have LinkedIn or TikTok data? In order for us as an industry to stay relevant we need to evolve our traditional sources, but also gain access to new ones to listen to where the conversations are taking place.
I would also recommend focusing on audience segmentation. This has proven rich for our stakeholders. Being bel to look at data that is extremely relevant to their use case has made it easier for our team to give more actionable recommendations and insights.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
This source of information is constantly evolving and is near real-time. You can also leverage it as a pulse check data set, and you can continually go back to the well if you do not feel that you have enough data. Unlike primary where you can go back and reinterview, but it costly and time intensive, which a major value proposition for social intelligence research.
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