What does social intelligence mean to you?
Today we experience the world – and get much of our information – through digital networks. Social intelligence is the study of how this happens: how information, culture and influence spread today. It can take many forms: aggregated data, familiarity with different online spaces, platform or community specific strategies. Social intelligence is a critical discipline. Without it, I think it’s fair to say that it’s impossible to understand and predict the modern, digital world. For us at NewsWhip, we think it’s critical that this understanding is as real time as possible – particularly for big brands with high value reputations, media companies following news cycles, and NGOs spotting misinformation and other issues.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
I’m motivated by a few factors. First, there’s the creation of new knowledge. Because we work with unique datasets like time series data on news engagement, I love that we create understanding that simply would not exist without NewsWhip. Then there’s the impact we have. Key people at the world’s most influential media companies, NGOs and brands, base their day to day decisions on our real time signals – and make better decisions as a result. Finally, there’s the people. I love our customers, who tend to be committed to improving how they answer their critical questions – I love their conviction that there must be a better way. And our team at NewsWhip who are dedicated to finding that way.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
It’s helpful that I’m a bit of an outsider. I didn’t plan to build NewsWhip as a social intelligence company – I just wanted to build a way for newsrooms to predict which stories were about to kick off each day. By starting with a different question to answer – and working with hundreds of media companies as well as brands – we have built a very different set of capabilities. Today these are highly differentiated and more valuable every day to brands who want to understand events as they’re happening.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
I’m motivated by a need for better understanding of how the human world is changing in the digital era. Without this understanding, humans can become pawns of our subconscious biases and ever improving AI algorithms that exploit them. I don’t think I have the skills or aptitude to be a real social intelligence expert myself. But I want to build the systems that will enable the very best experts, so they can create better explanations of what’s happening and why.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
As the SI Lab network well knows, social data is damn hard to summarize. It encapsulates all the variety and expressions of the human experience – so every time we generalize or extrapolate we lose details. This means our approaches need to be really smart. At NewsWhip we’ve built our platforms to summarize intuitively, but make it very easy to drill down to the unit pieces of content – posts, news articles, shares, and videos, that add up to a trend or story.
What does being a social intelligence pioneer mean in the context of your work?
We brought the first predictive platform to the social intelligence space – and in doing so we’ve wound up as accidental pioneers. But to us we’re just solving a really obvious problem: our clients need to predict the spread of news and information as it’s happening – not in a summary report at the end of a day or a week. We’re furiously committed to creating a platform that will keep going further in explaining and summarizing the world – live, as it happens.
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