How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I fell into this work. My background is in public health, mostly in the field of HIV disease. I was burnt out. Completely. I'm still involved in this world, continuing my work as a med school professor. I love teaching. But love doesn't pay the rent. So I signed up with a temp agency to get out and about, try new things, and meet new people while I figured out what to do next. Due to my experience leading teams and developing programs, the agency asked me to lead the first team of contractors performing social customer response at USPS. They liked what I did and within nine months I was asked to start the Social Business Intelligence program. I've recently been promoted to a newly created position which manages the SI and editorial teams. Before I started this work, I had never sent a tweet. I embraced the opportunity to learn something new and develop new skills. It turned out that my experience in managing people and developing programs is what was needed at the time. Because of my academic background, I'm a data geek. I want to know the why behind the what. I want to know the story the data is telling. And I want to know how the data tells us how to make things better for people.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Keeping and expanding my team from two to ten and developing a career path for them. So many have lost their jobs because of COVID. Where I work, we have had a transition in leadership, followed by a major reorganization. Many positions in our department were eliminated. To be able to keep my team intact under these circumstances demonstrates the extent to which our work is valued. Creating jobs, keeping people employed, and providing a promotional structure for my team means a great deal to me.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
We are fortunate enough to be housed within Communications as part of a Center of Excellence model. This makes us a servant with many masters, working with Communications (national and local, editorial, social customer response), marketing, operations, BOG, ELT, US Postal Inspection Service, HR, GR, and legal.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
Goodness. In the past year we have contended with a presidential election which relied on vote-by-mail, a pandemic, natural disasters, new products and services, and now we will be sending four free COVID tests to any American who wants one. At this point I don't have expectations. It's never the same day twice.
We have developed an interactive heatmap which shows customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts as well as online review sites. The intention is to provide users a 'one-stop shopping experience' for what is being said about us on social media down to the zip code level. Due to initial success, it is being implemented nation-wide.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
Harkening back to my days in health advocacy, I found that people value the opinions and experiences of their peers. I have people of the same political party and professions speak to each other (with law enforcement speaking with law enforcement and physicians speaking with physicians). Applying the same psychology to a different context, get the right people to perform the outreach or at the very least facilitate the introduction. We all get a ton of emails from people we don't know asking for things we don't have time for. Whether it is advocacy or SI, relationships matter as much as data.
Another thing to be mindful of is that you are competing for time and attention. Your audience probably doesn't suffer from a lack of data or reports. You need to demonstrate your value with actionable information presented in an accessible and compelling manner. Any computer can give you numbers, but only people can provide interpretation and inform a response. Your humanity is your superpower. Don't hide behind the numbers.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organizations doing social intelligence?
Don't limit yourself to marketing. SI can be used for any number of things: communications, PR, HR, operations, GR, legal issues (IP violations, threat assessment, fraud), customer experience... the list goes on and on. And for those who dismiss customer experience because they have POS surveys, they tend to forget certain biases: they tend to reflect the retail experience, they are most often motivated by extreme experiences rather than the typical one, and they aren't where the customer is at: online. Another issue with these surveys (POS, email, website) is that the audience for this data is limited to a few, select, internal players. Much of what SI can provide is publicly available for everyone to see. That's a pretty powerful motivator.
It doesn't matter how good you are if no one knows about it. This is a relatively new field and there are myths and misunderstandings about social media in general. People can't ask for what they don't know about and they may not know what they can ask for. Take your show on the road wherever possible: present at meetings, give tours of your war room, make a short film, have a presence at work conferences. For internal conferences, we provide a 'Social Media Salon' featuring snacks, comfortable couches, charging stations, selfie stations, live demonstrations of social customer response, and large screens displaying our work with panels explaining it (like an art exhibit).
You are not alone. There is no shame in asking for help. My experience with the SI community is that its members are colleagues, rather than competitors. There's no frenemy dynamic. The people I have had the honor of getting to know have become my consultants, confidants, cheerleaders. This is very different from what I have sometimes seen in the non-profit and academic sectors with people competing for the same, limited resources.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
In terms of the technology, I'd like to see advances in visual and audio listening and predictive analytics. I'd like to see inclusion of product and service reviews. I'd also like to see better data integration. In trying to be all things to all people, software companies are focusing on quantity rather than quality when it comes to their menu of services. And because the onboarding process is so labor-intensive, the emphasis is on recruitment of clients rather than retaining them.
As an educator I would like to see improvements in design. The features may be there, but their inclusion is sometimes done prioritizing the ease of the programmer rather than the needs of the user. The same can be said for the way data is displayed. A separate graph for each platform? I'm not going to ask someone to go through half a dozen graphs. Reader fatigue is real. If they don't read it, they won't use it. And if they don't use it, we can't justify the existence of our program.
As for implementation, our focus has been on crisis management, brand protection, and a better customer experience. We have looked at products and services, the concerns of our employees, and informing editorial content. I'm intrigued by the use of social intelligence for the development of new products and services.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
You snooze, you lose. Only half-kidding. Traditional approaches to social media involve posting content and seeing how well it performs, adjusting course accordingly. But it is a conversation driven by the company's agenda, not the customer's. And you don't know what you don't know. With social intelligence, the customer is determining the dialogue. It's a de facto focus group. They may be seeing things which never occurred to you. It's your choice if you want to see what is on the horizon or find yourself playing catch-up. Are you willing to take that chance? Decisions should be based on data, not instinct.
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