What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
Client Director
I use social listening across the full project cycle as it has so many applications.
When a client sends a brief or asks a question, social is one of the first places I explore to get a deeper understanding of the space and how we can solve the client’s problem. Having an immediately available data set in social media is so valuable as you can create a point of view on the problem very quickly and use it as stimulus to push your thinking.
Social is obviously most useful in the analysis stage. We have a technique called AI Powered Netnography which uses a combination of AI and human input to categorize very large open text datasets from social media and the web generally. The combination of social media’s depth of information and AI’s ability to analyze large quantities of data has been transformational to our organization and to that of our clients.
Lastly, one of the greatest benefits of social in my experience is its ability to inform primary research. This can be something simple such as providing inspiration for questionnaire and discussion guide content, but also early landscaping work to design better quality multi-stage research programmes.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I started out my career as a quant researcher doing a lot of tracking studies. Often in tracking, there aren’t the diagnostics to understand why a shift in metrics has taken place. And I would always find myself searching for answers, often on social media sites. I’d spend hours coding the comments manually which seems a bit daft now but I couldn’t create slides without a bar chart back then. A good outcome of this was that it sparked my interest in natural language programming techniques to make the exercise more efficient.
However, it was a workshop with a B2B insurance provider that really highlighted the value social data can have for both client projects and for my own self learning. I spent a couple days manually trawling business forums about insurance needs amongst SMEs and presented the findings back to the client. I was surprised at how useful the client found the insights, especially as I knew nothing about the category and was totally reliant on the data to have something to say.
So for me, social media is a brilliant source of insight for pretty much any category and subject, but also a great way to become more fluent about topics where I have limited knowledge.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
It was a fairly small project a few years back for a telco client. They wanted to understand the opportunity for some rather niche products (baby monitors, landline telephones and mesh wifi - and all in one project!) and had a limited budget. We used social and web data to provide a comprehensive understanding of the category needs and traditional quant to size the opportunity. It had all the elements I enjoy - learning about new and random topics, using social / web data for what it’s best at and producing something really useful for the client. And the scope of primary research was tiny.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
I don’t come across many misconceptions. Most of my friends and family don’t understand what I do (and I don’t blame them for that). Perhaps one is that it's a very technical job with lots of number crunching, but really, it’s very much a people based job.
Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)
All my clients are angels :)
Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
To be really honest, I believe we (agencies) are all developing and chasing similar techniques. The main missed opportunity in my opinion is not letting researchers get their hands dirty with social data and instead relying more on data scientists. As it’s the researcher who really understands the objective and who has the context to translate social data into implications for clients. So I feel traditional research skills and a bit of technical know how is a fantastic combination.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
Everyone at Strive who is pushing social media research genuinely inspires me, especially Sian Topp and Giuseppe Tonollini who put so much effort into developing their technical skill sets and advancing what we do in this area.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
I see more end-to-end social listening capabilities given AI’s strengths in analyzing social data. I also see data extraction becoming more accurate and automated for the same reason.
Get Social with SILab
