What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
Curiosity: I often spot the most interesting trends just by exploring or following a rogue data point. It’s easy to get caught in a routine doing the same thing over and over – try new segmentations and pull at threads, even if they seem small.
Patience and an open mind: Don’t get locked into proving a theory. Have theories, but don’t force them if the data doesn’t fit. Be open to where it leads, even if it isn’t the direction you expected (or wanted). It takes time to uncover meaningful insights, so don’t compromise quality to rush the process. And if something isn’t what you expected, it’s okay!
Communication: The best insight is wasted if your stakeholder doesn’t understand it. People’s attention is split in all directions – so don’t make your findings sound elaborate or complex (even if they are!) Make them as clear and simple as possible so stakeholders can quickly grasp takeaways.
Creative problem solving: Any tool can spit out data points. Add your value by connecting dots and uncovering things your team hasn’t seen or considered. And don’t limit yourself to what’s been done before; find a way to measure what matters most for your team’s unique needs.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
I think almost all challenges come back in some way to stakeholder education. Social intelligence and media insights aren’t as commonly known as something like web analytics or sales data, so some stakeholders may not even know what you can provide. And when it comes to proving value, it’s very hard to directly attribute ROI results to media insights, making it hard to compete with other data sources for attention or budget. As a result, the perception may be that social intelligence is a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘need to have.’ Having leaders that advocate for your insights and give you a voice and visibility in important conversations is a gamechanger.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
One of the most exciting things for me has been developing integrated insights, pulling in multiple sources to find common trends and look at the larger picture. For example, combining owned and earned social into custom measurements based on our annual priorities, or combining social and traditional media data to look at the full scope of coverage. This integration helps us impact a wide range of teams and understand trends at a more macro level. Seeing broader trends like key stories across sources or ways one source impacts another, helps our teams strategize more collectively.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
3 things that have helped me uplevel our program include:
1. Integration: Bringing social data alongside traditional media data uncovers new insights and increases visibility of both sources, helping us expand our impact across the organization. Know what your team prioritizes and explore how you could bring social into the fold.
2. Customization: No single data point or out-of-the-box dashboard will meet all your needs. Customized measurements can better track your priorities and ensure you measure what truly matters and will best inform strategy. For example, I use custom indexes that consider multiple inputs based on what’s important to us. This helps us measure what matters most AND simplify the data into a single output.
3. Prioritize insights over data points: Always ask if your insight informs anything – if the answer is no, dig one step deeper. We often see lists of data points labeled as ‘insights,’ but a number is rarely an insight by itself. Context to those numbers is key – for example, what does it mean to rank #4 in brand SOV? While successes and results are nice to see, the most value comes from the opportunities and trends that we uncover from those results.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
In short, I feel GenAI for listening was mostly hype in 2024, hopefully helpful in 2025 (and beyond). BUT, there’s a key factor that has affected, and will continue to affect, how much we benefit from AI… $$$. In a budget-free world, there is so much potential with niche AI tools built for listening. In the real world, especially on the brand side, most of us are restricted to 1 or 2 tools, maybe with some AI features. Once robust AI features are successfully integrated with existing tools, we’ll see the biggest impact. But so far, I think GenAI has been mainly hype for listening use cases – while it’s easy to say “let’s use AI,” it’s much more difficult to put into practice in a meaningful way or a way that significantly alters our workflows. The area where I’ve seen the biggest exception has been content summarization, but I still haven’t found a use case that truly transforms my work. If you have, I’d love to hear it!
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
A single, integrated tool where I had access to everything 😉 Wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a single platform with all types of features, from listening to AI tools to predictive tools, plus access to all channels (yes, even you, LinkedIn)?? Add to that a user-friendly UI, and we’d have the tool of our dreams.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
1. Build a team with a range of experiences. I haven’t yet met anyone who started out in this field – instead, it’s our diverse backgrounds that help us succeed. On my own team, we have people with backgrounds varying from engineering to PR to business, giving us a well-rounded group full of different perspectives and ways of thinking.
2. Remove ‘social’ from the title and focus on integrated insights. Social is a vital part, but we make a bigger impact when we can influence the larger team with common trends and insights.
3. Define boundaries for our scope. The majority of our time should ideally be dedicated to insights and intelligence, rather than activity-based reporting. Stakeholder education is a major piece of this as well, helping teams understand what we can do and what value we can bring. Anyone can pull a number from a dashboard, but the value of an intelligence team is in the deep dives and the double clicks.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
AI to make its mark: Hopefully, this is the year we move out of the hype zone and into the helpful zone. I’m excited to see what new features are added to existing tools and what new improvements are made to existing features. 2024 was a race to show some level of AI integration – 2025 will be the year to prove its value.
Exploring rising platforms like Threads & Bluesky: With social’s constantly changing landscape, it will be interesting to see how emerging platforms are adopted and how we can learn and grow along with them.
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