What was your journey/career path to your current position?
I started out working in PR and communications for B2B technology brands in 2008. Over time I specialised in digital marketing. As part of that, I became interested in the use of data and insights to drive decisions. This culminated in me starting and leading the insights and analytics team at Hotwire. And more recently, launching my consultancy, Priestley, in 2020.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
My proudest moment has been striking out on my own and launching Priestley. I wanted to start a digital marketing consultancy for B2B technology brands where data and insight are at the heart of every decision, rather than an afterthought. That's why everything we do at Priestley starts with understanding the customer, what they care about and how to engage them when they are making and researching purchase decisions. Using social intelligence is integral to that.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
In my mind, social intelligence is the insight gained from analysing conversations and behaviour on social media sites and forums. It's less about tracking trends, measuring results or monitoring conversations and more about understanding customers and using these insights to inform business decisions. It's also not just about marketing. Social intelligence can also help product, customer services and sales teams make decisions.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
In my experience, internal barriers and organisational culture tend to be the greatest challenge. There can be a lack of collaboration between teams. It's not unusual to find that research, data and social intelligence doesn't get shared with other departments. As consultants, we can support greater integration, but ultimately a top-down cultural change is needed.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
There needs to be more integration with other sources of data and insight. Social intelligence is incredibly valuable but it's just one piece of the puzzle. We can learn much more about our customers by combining this intelligence with insights gained from other data sources. For instance, search, web analytics, paid media, CRM data, customer interviews or surveys.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
My ambition with Priestley is to build a full-service digital marketing consultancy, specialising in developing and using data and insight to help B2B technology brands drive sales. I want us to be known for the quality of our work, so its really important to me that the business grows in a way that is sustainable and allows us to do that. Over the last year, wee been doing a lot of foundational work to put the right infrastructure in place to support the team in scaling up. We more than doubled in the last 12 months, with 80% of our client work coming through repeat business and recommendations
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
Ultimately social intelligence must evolve in line with how our use of social media changes. In the last year, we've seen much greater use of live audio on Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. It will be interesting to see how social intelligence tools evolve to capture data and gain insights from these conversations at scale. Looking further ahead, the metaverse could provide us with even more opportunities to gain insights from customer behaviour and conversations.
Get Social with SILab
