Paula Irigaray

What does social intelligence mean to you?

In my opinion, social intelligence is the art of transforming scattered and unstructured conversations and opinions of consumers on the digital channels into very timely, trendy and relevant insights.

What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?

I find social intelligence very fascinating and fun. One one hand, the learning curve in this industry is enormous, there are new platforms, technical developments and methodologies coming up all the time, which encourage you to continuously learn and grow as a professional.

On the other hand, the type of data we analyse is one of the most valuable sources of information we can get and can have a real impact on society. Nowadays, almost everyone is on social and tend to use these platforms to influence other people. By listening to these conversations, organizations and brands can quickly untap new trends and behaviors and avoid damaging situations for society such as bullying and harassment.

What do you think makes you successful in your work?

I believe innovation, exceeding expectations and collaboration have been the key for success for me.

Innovation

I carefully listen to the clients’ requests to discover commonalities in the needs they face, in order to create new social intelligence solutions and services for them. I work closely with the data science and product teams to develop these solutions.

I also innovate with the type of delivery and reports we provide, trying new and more impactful ways of showing the data.

I am constantly researching about new providers that we can collaborate with, new innovations that competitors are implementing, new platforms that we could use etc., so we can keep ahead  of competition.

Collaboration

I work exhaustively to create a collaborative atmosphere across and within teams.

For example, when we have to work on projects involving multidisciplinary teams (data science, strategy, insights, creativity etc.), I make sure I bring everyone on board from the beginning, align on objectives and clearly define everyone’s role so we can all work towards the same goal.

I also promote the collaboration within the team, by creating channels and sessions where the team feels safe to ask questions, share experiences and learn from each other.

Exceed expectations

I always try to provide the best results for the client by applying the knowledge and learnings from my past experience, both in terms of hard and soft skills.

For example, I always try  to raise the standards of social intelligence throughout the whole process my improving the day we obtain the data (query writing and tidying), the way we process the data (new solutions and frameworks) and the way we analyse it (by applying advanced research methodologies to social data such as customer journeys, segmentations, decision trees etc.)

What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?

Innovation, entrepreneurship, proactivity, team building and empowerment, mentoring, leadership, collaboration and good communication.

What makes social data special compared to other data sources?

Social data has a lot of advantages versus other types of data:

• True reflection of the voice of the consumer: tracks the organic and unprompted opinion of the consumer. You don’t need to create a closed list of questions and force the consumer to answer these questions, but they openly share their views about a topic.
• Scalability: you can access large volumes of data for one single topic/area of analysis.
• Real time data: you can identify trends and insights as soon as they arise.
• Richness in sources and applications: you can access data from different platforms (social media, blogs & forums, ecommerce sites, e-newspapers etc), each of them including different types of audiences (eg. ecommerce sites including product buyers, specialized foros including field experts). Each of these platforms can serve different research purposes, for example we can understand user experience through the ecommerce data and we can capture virality through the conversation on social media.
• Quickness to obtain: you do not need to wait several days to find respondents, then run the specific research methodology (questionnaire, focus group, community etc), you just need to write the query on the social listening platform and download the data.

What does being a social intelligence pioneer mean in the context of your work?

Being a pioneer translates into the following actions:

• The promotion of social intelligence within the LATAM region and Spain, markets traditionally less advanced in this field, by educating clients and the industry. In particular earlier this year, I led and organised a conference in Spain, consisting of a round table discussion and several presentations showcasing the power of social intelligence as a research tool. I have also been interviewed by “El Economista” Mexico to discuss the power of social intelligence, how to best maximise social data and how organisations can benefit from it.
• The creation of new solutions and measurement frameworks. For example I created an index called the Advocacy Index that tracks the brands’ online reputation, by compiling the conversation on social media, blogs & forums and ecommerce sites and compares it with competition. I also created another index called the Influencer performance index that tracks the impact of specific KOLs within an area of influence and is able to identify those who have the greatest performance.
• The diversification of the uses we can give to social data. I go beyond the usual KPI tracking such as SOV or crisis management and apply advanced research methodologies (audience segmentation, customer decision journeys, usage & attitudes etc) to help brands move from “traditional research” to “modern research”.
• The improvement of the standards of social intelligence within my team by regularly running sharing sessions where they present the recent studies they have worked on; discuss what has gone well, not so well and how they could improve in the future. And by also running sessions to brainstorm how we can improve our set-up and data gathering processes as well as the current analytics tools that we have within the organisation.

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