What does social intelligence mean to you?
When I started in marketing, the process of making big strategic and creative decisions was based almost entirely on educated guesswork. How successful your campaigns were largely dependent on luck. I found it staggering how much investment was committed based on such little information about the audience.
Social Listening was a great step forward and gave us insight but the trick is interpreting that into useful action and advice that brands can use. At its most basic level that’s what social intelligence is to me. A really fascinating combination of technology, people and process that can have a fundamental impact into how a company acts.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
Being able to provide a brand with deep insight into its audience, which illuminates new paths on how to connect with them, is always really exciting to me.
It’s fascinating to understand a company’s marketing challenges and help them adopt a data-driven strategy, one that gets to the heart of how they can best tell their story. Being able to affect positive change inside of large organisations is super rewarding, especially when you start seeing the impact that has on their success. Finally, I’m a technologist at heart so working with our engineering team to develop new AI, data visualization tools and features for the Buzz Radar platform is a huge motivator.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
That is a hard question. I think an ability to connect the dots in creative ways ultimately is something that helps me a lot in my work. Being severely dyslexic can be a pain, but it forces me to find unconventional ways to solve problems, which is something I rely heavily on. Social intelligence is a complex undertaking … it involves cutting-edge technology and complicated processes and people. I think the ability to pull those things together and convince really talented folk to work together and solve tough problems is key.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
I think the ability to really get underneath the surface of a client’s key challenges is crucial. That requires being able to ask the right questions, read between the lines, and take into consideration wider context. Being multidisciplinary is useful as well; I’m part account person, part product developer, part strategist. Being able to straddle all those things gives me a great overview of how to piece the best solution for clients. I’d say the most useful skill, however, is to able to identify super talented people and somehow convince them to come work at Buzz Radar.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
For me, social data is unique. It’s a massive anthropological study happening in real-time across millions of topics and groups. Being largely unstructured means that you can analyse it in so many different ways. That combined with the size of the data-set gives us the ability really tough questions. Not just about how people feel but more profoundly, it provides deep insight into individuals and groups personalities, behaviours and desires. I think we are only scratching the surface of what is possible, especially when it comes to how AI can help us predict outcomes.
What does being a social intelligence pioneer mean in the context of your work?
Our job at Buzz Radar is to answer the hardest marketing questions using our social data platform, AI engineers and super talented analysts. That requires us to be at the cutting-edge of social intelligence and trying new things. Some work and some don’t, but that’s all part of the process developing new insights that move the industry forward.
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