What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I am the founder of The Social Question. We are a social media research agency where we collaborate with creators to offer research opportunities to their followers, this could be either in app via IG stories, or we can recruit for a traditional research engagement. In our Content Connections™ methodology, we download the incoming IG responses via our ScribeQ™ tool to use for data analysis and insight mining. I knew from past work that social intelligence tools couldn’t penetrate this type of content and there are some really powerful conversations happening in IG stories. So when you combine the public data with the community data, it’s a really powerful story.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I spent the first 10 years of my career as a research supplier, specifically as a qualitative moderator. My progressive and profound hearing loss led me to building a new research methodology interplaying my love for social media as a user, with my passion for data analytics. The market research industry has yet to fully embrace how and where to fit in social intelligence data. And I kept waiting for another tool or bigger company to come along to leverage the IG Stories Stickers, and when none came along I built my own app. For many researchers the intelligence data is too abstract for them, they’re rooted in primary research control and there are a lot of skeptics distrusting data they can’t see or touch the sources from. I’m hopeful that as my company gains traction, this will lead to better synergies between our fields.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
I have two: I will start with my very first influencer collaboration. I knew I had a worthwhile idea but had not seen this style of engagement in action. So I self-funded a project with a creator in the anxiety community and we did a case study, would people respond? Does my tech work? Seeing it come to life is a core memory. Not only did the people come, but their answers were so genuine and much more detailed and expressive than what we tend to see in online surveys. We learned a lot about the physical manifestations of anxiety that we weren’t expecting. Second would be a sponsorship I assisted where we leaned into learning more from the LGBTQIA+ community on their gender, sex, and sexual orientations identities. These social media users were so excited to being asked these questions and that people care enough to research the topic. The Social Question is aptly named not just because we use social media in our process, but also because we plan to work on social issues, or social topics. We’re two years in and helping research teams connect with “non-traditional” markets is a challenge we thrive on.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
Easily that I am an influencer agency. Or that I build marketing campaigns for social media. We are neither. While I work with influencers, I curate each partnership and have no plans on adding another “find your influencer” type platform to the table. We run social media ads to promote our projects, but we’re not in bed with marketers peddle pushing products. ScribeQ™ is our growth focus for 2024; expanding this proprietary technology so that it’s scaleable and accessible in order to confidently leverage what I consider passive social intelligence tools with the power of community engagement on the same topics. So both stage data and behind the curtain data into one production. But for now, I’m having to first educate the research world that data is reliably available from social media and is a new skill to learn.
Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)
Most of my clients, those who have truly used our services, are great. It’s the lost projects that are more nightmare’ish because they just don’t understand social media or are too scared to experiment or try. And I get it, most of us have fixed budgets and dollars to spend on new methods and the research community is notoriously risk averse. So people who don’t understand and try to toss our methods under the bus; we see you. We know you are actually more scared of the unknown deliverable since it’s not in a carefully controlled environment like most methods. But that doesn’t mean the real conversations existing without us are any less valuable. We’re trying to meet in the middle and bring you to the table, but if you don’t want the seat that’s fine. You are welcome to dine somewhere else.
Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
Yes! I’m obviously biased but I truly think we’ve largely missed this opportunity that I am growing with The Social Question to discover and activate these community conversations. When IG released the three stickers engagements in 2016 and 2017, I was literally on the edge of my office chair waiting to see this data gold mine surge. But years went by with…no progress? That’s when I got bold to see what was possible. The fact that Meta has billions of conversations unmined is mind boggling to me. The questions and conversations happening in Stories is so beautiful covering all kinds of truly social impact and the mundane that bring about real connectedness. I’ve been to presentations and feel like they get close to this idea but then skirt into another direction. And privacy is 100% a concern, but I think we have that managed right now in our process by blinding usernames in our final data files and deleting original data once it’s been proofed. I do not expect to be the only player in this space for too long.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
Franky Gregory. Frank and I have a shared background in advertising and actually went to the same grad program years apart (VCU Brandcenter). When we initially connected, I knew a tiny bit of social listening tools through exploring during past roles but I didn’t know how robust it had become. He was one of the first people I shared my business idea with and was so encouraging. He's a great cheerleader and brilliant with this social analytics.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
I really hope we see more collaboration. I think AI is going to force companies to turn inward for legal and proprietary reasons, but I think we need to challenge ourselves on how to stay connected. Most two tools or resources are not truly identical. I want to see more mashups, more partnerships. Obviously among the research community and SI industry, but also within. We risk being too fragmented and staying in our lanes too much when there’s plenty of space to build together.
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