What was your journey/career path to your current position?
Not linear, that‚'s for sure. I studied Urban Planning & Economics in Sydney, Australia and shortly after, I was offered a transfer in my company to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I took that up back in 2004/5. After working in that field for 2-3 years, I decided it wasn't for me. Then began the long journey at D/A in a web publishing/content agency. In 2017/18, I realised that all the information I was getting from social listening platforms for Arabic was inaccurate. After re-hashing a lot of the data we were collecting from those platforms, we decided to build out something that fit our needs. More importantly, we didn't need to translate a language to understand sentiment. We hired and got moving, and now we have a great platform that's making Arabic audience intelligence more insightful and accurate!
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Launching and seeing Sila, our Arabic-native, AI-enabled consumer intelligence platform, uncover audience truths that have moved the needle for brands we've worked with. We've helped large, global companies find their voice in the Arabic-speaking world of 300mn people, and more importantly, seen first-hand their numbers grow and market positions get better as a result. So, I guess what I’m doing now!
What does social intelligence mean to you?
I guess that depends on which way you look at that - in the traditional sense, it's being able to learn from those around you to understand yourself and others better; in the modern mind, it's utilising vast data points to do the same.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
We've been quite lucky that we've worked with forward-thinking companies that haven't necessarily blocked how we've used the data to drive insight. I guess that those insights have solved real challenges has helped in the adoption. I can see some reluctance, though, with the research community sometimes on the value of social platforms to provide intelligence solutions - and primarily, this is because they've come from a more traditional background.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
It is probably better to position itself in the market with PR and the ability to make real insight from trending topics so that business leaders can understand the value that social intelligence can bring. We've done this recently with the Sila Consumer Sentiment Index - the only index of consumer sentiment in Arabic (and dialect) in the GCC. It uses social data to understand this sentiment - and it makes news. This enables us to show regular decision-makers the power of analysis of social insight.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
Growth - we're growing the team and our presence in the MENA region. TO do this, we've invested more in Sila as a platform and adding more NLP and ML models, like emotion in dialect and share of search in Arabic, to our offering to serve regional and global customers better.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
That's an interesting question - the main thing is access to data. As platforms inevitably close up more, how will we access meaningful data and make it work? We're looking more and more towards search and platform-based data (say first-party ad data) to better understand insights and how that might affect large amounts of people. I think the industry is already on that constantly evolves. We might have to grow more focused on measurement, insight from that, and invited-perspective research, but at scale to serve meaningful impact. Also, I see the industry more involved in the media planning side as time goes on - it seems a bit of a missed opportunity as well.
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