How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
After working in a role that combined content development and market research, I was looking for a new opportunity and discovered a start-up company that was mining online conversations for consumer insights. This was in the early 2000s (before the launch of Twitter!) and we focused mostly on blogs and Usenet groups, but once I saw the richness of the data, I was hooked. I worked on the supplier side for several years, delivering insight reports to clients, before moving to the CPG side to help my company set up and democratize a social insights capability internally.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
I currently work in a centralized role with the goal of helping teams learn to use social data as part of their insights practice. I love the moments when someone comes back to show me what they learned through social intelligence - when they took the skills I helped them learn and uncovered a great, actionable insight for their brand.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
For CPG companies overall, understanding and connecting to our consumers as humans has never been more important. Social data gives us a window to build that human understanding by hearing directly what our consumers are thinking and feeling. At Mondelez, we have used social intelligence to support creative development, campaign briefing, and innovation – and looking ahead, we want to push further in the areas of real-time brand health measures and trend-spotting.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
We will continue to build on the basic social intelligence practice within our Insights community, and we're also looking to use social data in a more predictive way, from brand health to innovation and trend-spotting.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
To drive buy-in, I ask people to think about their own behavior as a consumer and how they use social media for entertainment and information across nearly all aspects of their lives. As marketers, if we ignore that rich source of insight, what are we missing? It's very gratifying to see that 'a-ha' moment when a stakeholder realizes the value of social intelligence in understanding our consumers, even if that realization sometimes happens one stakeholder at a time.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Social intelligence won't be the right solution for every possible research question, and it's worth spending time to make sure you're matching the right approach for your business need to really get value. Social intelligence isn't a magical 'insight button' (as much as we might wish for one!).
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
AI hasn't reached the level of accuracy where it can replace a human analyst (thankfully!), but I would like to see additional application of AI in social intelligence to speed the process of making sense of such a vast set of unstructured data. In particular, using AI to help uncover emerging/diverging themes and make connections between different topics frees up valuable analyst time to focus on the insight and business implication. I would also like to see insights professionals weaving social intelligence together with other research sources to build a clearer overall picture and a better/faster understanding of what is important to our consumers and stakeholders.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
Successful brands today need to build a connection with their consumers, at a time when consumers are being bombarded with more information each day than ever before. Social intelligence starts from the perspective of what the consumer thinks is important, not what marketers want to ask. Using social intelligence lets us see the world from the consumer's point of view and gives us a window into how we can build that connection.
Get Social with SILab
