What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
My current job title is VP Social Intelligence. It sounds very glamorous and important, but in reality me and a gang of very smart analysts at the Social Intelligence Center of Excellence help a number of Publicis Groupe agencies with their SI needs. Since our clientbase is very diverse - from PR agencies, to ad and media planning agencies, we encounter a wide range of SI applications. The team and I handle everything - from simple brand tracking and monitoring, crisis and campaign monitoring to the more elaborate and rewarding uses of SI like consumer profiling and insight extraction to fuel and ignite creativity.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I studied International business and Economics in college where I got interested in economics and marketing but got turned off by SPSS and econometrics. So stats and math models killed the allure of understanding how people and societies behaved. However, I was pretty good at using ProQuest, EbscoHost, and Emerald Insight which helped me land a job at a media monitoring company (media as in newspapers and magazines, not social media). A short stint as a brand consultant and the rise to prominence of social media propelled me into the world of Social intelligence and I have been doing this for the past 15+ years.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
Any work where the team contributed to Publicis winning a pitch or a report ending at the desk of the client’s CEO or a legendary chief brand officer (yeah, Marc Pritchard has seen some of our awesome work).
Aside from that, any project that called for innovative use of our SI toolkit and allowed the team to shine and prove the value of SI.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
There are a few and they refuse to go quietly into the night.
Fist, there is a misconception that everybody, or at least our desired target audience, is on social media and is baring its soul about the brand/product/topic of interest.
Second, there is a lot of misconception about how much demographic and geographic data we can get from the various social media platforms and that we can slice and dice the data as the data we get from marketing surveys.
The third misconception revolves around the quant metrics we get from the social listening tools. Trying to build accurate and useful data models using social media data is extremely hard and often futile for a number of reasons (overrepresentation of platforms, nature of content (visual vs short text vs long form).
The fourth one is about trend identification. We don’t plug in into the social media ether and pull trends, we need a focal point and context and can only verify and track trends.
The last one is relatively new, but there is a notion you can just plug in a social listening search into a generative AI model and it will spew out great consumer insights.
Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)
We should totally have a Black list of such clients!
But yeah, anybody that requests anything from the list above.
Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
One of the great things about the SI Lab is that it lets us exchange notes and get a feel of where we stand and what is happening in the industry. So in this regard, we are mostly up to par with the industry - we encounter the same issues and are working with similar toolkits or toward similar goals.
I still believe the social listening tools are lagging behind our needs and wants and this is one of the reasons a lot of practitioners are developing in-house tools to address some white spots in the tools portfolio.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
Shout out to Dr Jillian Ney for starting and nurturing this great endeavor and community.
Bernard Brenner from Microsoft - his talk at the Observe Summit 2023 was truly inspirational.
And of course my partners in crime at the Publicis SI Center of Excellence.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
It is hard to escape the gen AI talk these days. I am cautiously optimistic about gen AI and our industry overall. It will definitely streamline the monitoring aspect of our work and let us focus on the intelligence part that requires bigger human-in-the-loop involvement.
On the other hand, we will have to endure the new wave of tools overpromising and peddling gen AI snake oil.
The growing SI Lab community and the level of talent it has attracted is another thing that fuels my optimism.
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