What does social intelligence mean to you?
I had to answer the same question in 2023 so I went back to check what I wrote. Not much has changed since then but in 2025 I have some hard numbers to support my claims. Social intelligence continues to establish itself as an integral part of the market research toolkit. According to WARC’s “The Future of Strategy 2024” report social listening was among the top 3 research practices marcom strategists did on daily basis, beating by far quant and qual data analysis and research and was the only activity to grow in popularity from the previous year, from 12% in 2023 to 21% in 2024. If you are wondering what the other two daily activities were - “Reading online sources” (74%) and “Reading Print Magazines & Newspapers” (39%), once again proving Social Intelligence is becoming the go-to tool for consumer insights.
What are you doing that no-one else is to drive the social intelligence industry forward?
If I have to describe the SI Lab community with one word, that word would be “Camaraderie.” and this camaraderie stems from the common challenges all of us in the industry face and overcome. We are pretty open to sharing ideas and collaborating, trying to get all boats to rise with the tide. So shout out to Dr Jillian Ney and all the other SI people out there who do events, webinars, hangouts, lecture at universities, do academic research, build the tools of the trade or just do stellar work at agencies and brands.
The only thing that comes to mind that might be somewhat unique to my situation is scale. The Publicis Social Intelligence Center of Excellence has a chance to serve the entire Publicis Groupe (100K employees worldwide) and various clients of the Groupe and prove the value of SI to a large number of people internally and externally.
It's the year 2030: What does the practice of social listening look like?
I fall in the Philip Tetlock camp when it comes to forecasts and accuracy, or lack thereof. There will always be some efforts to discern consumer insights from publicly available digital data.
However, it is hard to predict what will happen with TikTok and Twitter/X in 2025 as it is, or what new platform will emerge in the next 5 years (who really saw TikTok’s rise or the resurgence of podcasts?).
One thing that has proven resilient over the years and remains a great source for consumer insights is forums. The relative anonymity and collective knowledge will probably keep luring users.
I guess social listening will keep running on some old social media platforms and some new “raw materials” from other platforms and sources.
Also, we might see better use of AI to streamline some of the grunt work.
What is the most common question you are helping your clients answer?
“What is going on with XYZ? What are people thinking and saying about XYZ?”
So anything to do with people, not always consumers, their behaviour and attitudes toward a product category, brand or a topic.
Have you got a favourite social intelligence use case or case study from the last year?
The team did a few reports that reached the clients’ CEOs and CMOs. Anytime this happens, I feel like that scene with Tom Hanks and the fire in the movie “Castaway.” Not sure if I am allowed to insert and animated gif here but here it is :))
On the more creative side of SI, we managed to build a pretty exhaustive path-to-purchase model for a major cosmetics brand using social listening and search data.
Lastly, we had to repurpose some social listening tools to answer some wacky requests and managed to do some “vibes-based” social listening.
They say to be great you need to read around your subject – what are you currently reading or your favourite book and what insights have you been able to apply to your work?
If you define “your subject” as humans and their behavior, then my answer is - I read a lot of online sources like The Economist, The Guardian, The WSJ, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Wired, The New Yorker, The New York Times, pretty much any quality journalism that provides longish form content on society, politics, economics and tech. I tend to have like 20-30 open tabs on my browser with articles saved for later. I also listen to podcasts, mainly The Ezra Klein Show, Freakonomics Radio, Pitchfork Economics, and Plain English. My team and I deal with a wide range of clients and topics so I need to be in-the-know of a lot of, often unrelated, subjects.
Now if we define “your subject” as Social intelligence, I highly recommend “Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information” by Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen. It provides an excellent framework on when and why consumers turn to social media in their consumer-path-journey.
“Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years” by Tom Standage, the Deputy Editor of The Economist, is an excellent book on the history of social media and might offer a glimpse of what lies ahead for social media.
If you had to share three emojis that summed up social intelligence, what would they be?
🚀 🔥 😅
What advice would you give to a brand who wanted to create an internal social intelligence team?
Let people with research background or research mindset run the programme, don’t hand in the reins to somebody from your digital team just because they have been running your brand’s social media accounts and producing social media content.
Don’t obsess over vanity metrics like share of voice or sentiment. These rarely hold value or provide consumer insights. Give the team room to breathe and create, social intelligence does not come from dashboards or monthly/quarterly reports.
Mind social intelligence has some limitations and we are at the mercy of people’s willingness to talk and search online. So sometimes SI might not be the best tool to answer your inquiry.
Be careful when selecting your social listening tool. Mind there might be no one tool that meets all your needs so it is ok to use more than one tool.
Don’t fall too much for the Gen AI gizmos.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
I am anxious yet optimistic about 2025. The current state of affairs around the world will boost the demand for our services, just like in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Usually tumultuous times like these offer great opportunities for our trade to demonstrate the value of our services and innovate.
However, the current state of affairs will also force some organizations and brands to “optimize” their budgets.
I hope the Gen AI craze will abate (not going to happen though) and we will start seeing better and more useful Gen AI applications.
I also expect the SI ranks to continue growing and attract the type of top talent we have been witnessing in the SI Lab circuit lately.
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