What does social intelligence mean to you?
Social intelligence means learning about consumers based on their own actions and opinions. Using social intelligence effectively allows PepsiCo to unlock new trends and better understand consumer preferences across existing and new consumers.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
They need to be able to analyze large swaths of uncategorized data to start to find trends and better understand what consumers are doing. They need to be able to tell a story with data and help leadership understand the value of this data compared to more historically used data sources.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
The biggest challenge is breaking the stigma that social intelligence is a “new” or “unproven” insights platform. Businesses need to recognize that they will be able to act significantly faster and at the speed of consumer preferences when using social intelligence to bolster business decisions.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
Using social data to understand new flavor and taste trends with consumers. One of the PepsiCo snack brands was looking for a new way to invigorate a brand that has been slacking in sales and they used social listening to understand if a new flavor would help increase purchase habits. The business found that consumers were interested in very unique flavors to match with the product so the brand started releasing small batch flavors to match these profiles. The small patch products exploded on social media and drove sales of the product.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
Have deep knowledge and understanding of what the business is looking for and how we can use social data to reach those goals. Being able to tie back the work you are doing to those larger business goals will allow you to expand the visibility of social data and find that it can be used in a number of different areas for the business.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
Helpful! Any tools that will allow us to find insights faster will be crucial in expanding social intelligence in any organization. It will also help with generating better topic builds, dashboard creations and analyzing all the open sources of data. A social intelligence team will still be needed to help craft the process, assess the data and present insights, but Gen AI will hopefully make the more tedious processes with social intelligence much more efficient.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
Being able to have more access from social platforms on what consumers are publishing publicly. I would love to not have to rely on just one or two sources for most of the data ingested. Additionally, better solutions to analyze video content on social.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
- Make sure they have an insights or analytics background and showcasing results with large data sets
- 100% alignment with business objectives and tie back all work being done to those objectives.
- Make it international to help combat assumption biases based on cultural preferences
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
I’m excited to see what new and interesting sources we’ll have at our disposal as new platforms hit the market and I’m super excited about what we can unlock using AI for creation and insights.
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