What does social intelligence mean to you?
For me, social intelligence is the practice of harnessing existing social media data — be it qualitative conversational feedback or quantitative engagement and performance metrics — and leveraging it to glean valuable insights about our brands or audiences, answer critical business questions, and inform strategic decisions.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
Successful social listeners will have a good blend of technical, analytical, and communication skills: Technical expertise to select and customize your tech stack, construct queries, access relevant data feeds, and QA or clean your data; Analytical skills to problem-solve, identify themes and trends, and extract actionable insights from your social listening data; And strong communication and storytelling skills to then effectively present complex ideas and insights to your stakeholders.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
There is a misconception that investing in the right social intelligence technology platform is the key to social intelligence success. I’ve seen brands license and onboard best-in-class products only to realize they didn’t have the in-house subject matter expertise to use them effectively. Even with the ever-growing selection of SITech platforms and the recent proliferation of AI tools to support social intelligence efforts, social listeners can’t just “pull a report” at the press of a button. There’s still a crucial human element needed to ensure data quality, mitigate bias, understand the context behind sentiment data, and contextualize the results.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
One of my favorite use cases for social intelligence is when we introduce consumers to a new television show or brand for the first time — whether through a press announcement, key art release, or trailer drop — and get the first glimpse at unsolicited, unstructured, and unfiltered feedback about the new property. Just like that, the previously unknown entity suddenly transforms into a widely debated topic with nuanced positive and negative sentiment drivers, a demographic and psychographic audience profile, and a multitude of other insights and considerations that can be incorporated into a formal marketing strategy. Best of all, it's a completely organic way to bring consumer feedback into the creative process.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
Brand tracking and campaign monitoring are very process-orientated replicable exercises. To dig deeper and move beyond that, I would recommend focusing more on the project than the process. Don’t lock yourself in a box with rigid templates or standard operating procedures for every type of project or analysis. Instead, focus on your specific unique use case or business question, define what you’re trying to solve for, determine which tool or combination of tools could get you closer to an answer, and let that guide your analysis.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
I was actually fortunate enough to be able to build my social intelligence team from the ground up not too long ago. One of my first steps was to define clear roles and responsibilities for each member of the team so that each individual could really hone their skills and build their specific subject matter expertise. The second was to make sure we’re using a best-in-class tech stack that suits our particular industry and use cases. The third was to set up internal tracking and collaboration tools to document best practices, track benchmarks, stay on top of deadlines, and collaborate on some of our more in-depth and multi-faceted projects.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
With X-like microblogging platforms like Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon gaining a lot of traction in recent months, I’m curious to see how TV fan communities develop on these sites and which platform—if any—emerges as the network of choice for some of these communities.
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