How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
Now, that is an interesting story. I started my career in Sales and shifted to Digital Analytics very soon. Since then, I have led Digital Marketing and Analytics functions, Consumer Insights and Strategy for global Tech and Media giants.
I was exposed to Social Intelligence by Randy Hlavac (@RandyHlavac) from Northwestern University. I was browsing through online courses on Coursera and stumbled upon his course on Social Media Intelligence. I immediately enrolled for the course and completed all his lectures.
At the same time, it so happened that a team was being set up for social intelligence at Time Inc. I immediately grabbed the opportunity. I was lucky! Today when I look back, it seems that I took a right call. Social Intelligence is the future. Two years later, I joined ITC ltd. to set up an inhouse social intelligence COE. I still continue to grow and lead this team.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
I am very proud of setting up, training and nurturing a team of fully functional social intelligence cohort with in my current organization. This team is three years in age, first of its kind in the country and this makes me proud. Seeing that spark in the eyes of young researchers - as they answer business questions using social intelligence, being appreciated for their good work has been proudest moment/s for me.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
Apart from regular activities like brand health track, online reputation management and campaign performance measurement, we use social intelligence for answering all types of business strategy questions. Social intelligence proved to be eyes and ears of the organization during COVID times - we were able to identify emerging consumer needs around health and hygiene and pivot our brand offerings quickly. The social intelligence team partners with product development to identify emerging category nuances, packaging team to closely monitor sustainability and packaging trends, content team to identify moment marketing opportunities and many more synergies.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
I am in the process to driving synergies between teams. The power of social intelligence will become multifold as teams come together to solve larger business questions. As this happens, everyone will start believing in the duality of social intelligence - the power of social intelligence in delivering both qualitative and quantitative insights. The next level of maturity I plan to have for next year is to understand my consumer better - why do they think, feel and act the way they do?
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organizational buy-in?
My advice is - start with easy (yet critical) use cases of Social Intelligence like Brand health track. This is an easy to implement process, has high returns and is critical to every brand/s. Once you are able to establish its usability, start building from there and involve other key stakeholders in your organization.
What piece of advice would you give to others working with in organizations doing social intelligence
Social intelligence is as much an art as it is a science. A good listening tool will give access to unlimited consumer verbatims. But, tools have its limitations and there is much beyond just word clouds. Reading through consumer conversations and decoding underlying meaning is an art and will come with practice. So, dive into your data and get your hands dirty.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
While Social intelligence will keep on providing more and more data to drive every decision making at organizations, evolution and acceptance of Social intelligence to solve social problems is where the future lies. I read in one of the journals yesterday that 'Incel activity on social media was linked to local mating ecology'. Now, this is actually how social media data should be used to identify and solve society problems.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
Social Intelligence is fast, generates unbiased insights, gives access to glocal (global + local) data at click of a button - all of this at one tenth the cost. It is the future. My question to business leaders would be - Why wouldn’t they incorporate it in their organization's growth strategy.
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