Has the perception of social intelligence changed within your organisation since you won last year’s SI Insider 50? If so, how?
One clear marker of change has been an investment via headcount. Both on the research team and with our suppliers. With a broader foundation, the Social Intelligence Practice (SIP) at Microsoft is able to be in more strategic conversations, explore more workstreams and tackle more business questions. We’re also able to hold time for richer research innovation and reporting productization.
With this added growth + demand, it’s been wonderful getting more people –new social data practitioners and busy stakeholders alike– more comfortable with the messiness of social data. Understanding the mess close up together helps us build appropriate methods, elevate interpretation, be willing to experiment and communicate more clearly the insights we spot. Whether it’s a quick-turn incident analysis or a deep exploratory research brief, we learn the most –from the data and from each other– by leaning in and taking a close look around. By being close to the data, we are at a prime place to innovate our methodologies, use cases and outputs.
It’s been a honor to support the development and evolution SIP’s research this past year – unlocking more and more of social intelligence’s value. Bring on 2023!
What’s the most interesting social listening project you’ve worked on in the last year?
So tough to pick! I’ve had the privilege to do time-sensitive trend reporting as well as deep, exploratory research on a wide range of topics for a wide range of stakeholders at Microsoft.
2022 was largely a year of wrangling abstract concepts into digestible, strategic insight to successfully showcase the power of social data again and again. Brand love, joy, pride, privacy, nostalgia, sustainability — all broad territories I worked with suppliers + stakeholders to tease out meaning to inform brand strategy, marketing, comms + messaging, product naming, thought leadership and engineering prioritization. What is brand love? How does joy show up in the workplace? How do people talk about privacy? Nostalgia? Sustainability? Clippy? ChatGPT? VALL-E?
One public example I partnered with SHARE and Dr. David Evans was supporting Microsoft’s research efforts to better understand the psychology of privacy in the digital age and the need for user trust + resilience.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
I think Microsoft’s growth mindset culture plays a major part of SIP’s success and, in turn, mine. There is an incredible emphasis within all levels of the company to cultivate a ‘learn-it-all’ mentality rather than a ‘know-it-all’ one.
For me, this mindset –paired with the ever-evolving social intelligence space– fuels my curiosity and encourages me to hold space for discovery, experimentation, innovation and storytelling. It also creates an environment of supportive colleagues, stakeholders and suppliers who are open to experiment in this newer research discipline and who are eager to learn and do more.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
As researchers, we’re trained to contextualize information, synthesize the materials, and then communicate a clear, compelling point of view. This is an incredibly useful skillset to strengthen regardless of research discipline. These skills help you
- share complex insights credibly and
- quickly make sense of information others share with you.
The world of social intelligence is fast-paced and cutting edge– so, in addition to the above, I am also on constant lookout for what’s out on the horizon and how the SIP team can best meet these moments down the road.
For example:
- Is this observation an emerging trend or just an anomaly?
- How might this develop into an up-and-coming question and how might we tackle answering it?
- Is it worth developing a query or key visuals to have in our back pocket?
- What is the bigger picture this observation points to? How can we bring form, analytics and rigor to this abstract hunch?
- Is there a new methodology or technique or data viz worth testing? Can we keep an eye toward productizing as we develop and iterate?
- How can we use the social intelligence here to assess future needs or future demand? How might these emerging areas impact other workstreams?
- And, last but not least, how can we use social intelligence so our stakeholders and leadership are armed with strongest insights (and hopefully are able to sleep a little better at night this week and in six months)?
I think weaving these attributes together –clear-cut synthesis with an eye to the future– energizes the team, positions us to be in a highly pro-active state, propels us to do our best work and craft our sharpest, most impactful insights.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
From my experience with other research disciplines, social data has a profound specialness due the unique combination of its speed, its scale, its depth, its unprompted and unvarnished voice of the customer, its endless expressions of creativity and its ever-changing nature. 2022 was a year of a lot of new terrain for all of us in this research discipline to navigate, and I think 2023 will only be adding to that in spades.
There is so much at our fingertips and we’re still just beginning to scratch the surface on unlocking its potential! I’m excited to explore 2023’s terrain and dig in more.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
For me, there are two main motivators:
- People. The people I work with, the people who use Microsoft products and the people who share their perspectives, creativity and ideas online. I love that social intelligence allows me to collaborate with great colleagues to elevate insights and spotlight emerging needs so Microsoft can iterate and help people achieve more. I feel close to users, close to strategists, close even to the future, and fully part of Microsoft’s mission.
- The fast, ever-changing nature of social media. Social, in my experience, is never dull. There’s always a cool question, topic or technique worthy of investigation. At a macro level, platforms ebb + flow; how + why people express themselves to do too. Shifts to Mastodon, shifts in emoji usage, rapidly morphing memes – we always work hard to uncover, interpret, and contextualize our ever-evolving stream of social posts. Social intelligence may be forever morphing, but that’s part of the joy, tenacity and fun of being a practitioner in this research discipline.
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