What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?
I’m Associate Director at Ipsos Synthesio UK, a market-leading SaaS platform for collecting and analysing billions of digital data points including social data, reviews, news, as well as search data. So, social listening is not just a part of my job; it is my job. However, I would like to highlight it’s not only about social, but about broader scope of digital data.
I help our clients to discover insights as part of our consultancy offering from an array of digital data, which can be used to understand consumers, their needs, concerns, attitudes, and to spot emerging trends and/or whitespaces. We also use this data to track brand performance in a competitive landscape, evaluate campaign effectiveness, and more.
We're always improving our platform, adding new features, algorithms, tools, and solutions to better serve our clients' needs. My goal is to educate and support our clients as well as push product development in the most valuable way for our clients.
What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?
I have a sociological background, with a PhD in Sociology, and began my career as a public opinion researcher and consumer insight manager. However, after a few years, I felt a professional stagnation. I was continuously thinking that our results were biased, as we asked people about what we assumed they were interested in, rather than letting them express their thoughts freely. This led me to join a social listening start-up as a product research director in 2012. Since then, I've been analysing unstructured digital data. Although the startup was short-lived, it set me on the path that I continue to follow. Over the past 12 years, I've held various roles in different companies, but my passion for this field remains strong.
What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?
All the work that I have done holds immense importance for me as it allows our clients to make robust business decisions. The most special one was through which I met my wife which is of course rather dear to me 😊.
Besides that, the most ground-breaking project for me was a consumer trends analysis approach I created in collaboration with Ipsos Russia and YouScan. I worked as a product and analytical lead at Sberbank. We invented, developed and validated the approach for ongoing 360-degree, query-less social media consumer trends analysis. This approach enabled the identification of emerging trends, which were then used for tactical and strategic business needs such as bank communications, campaign planning, reputation management, and consumer understanding and product development.
A project that also deserves a special mention is the cross-country Trend Radar project that I am currently leading. In this project, we discover, identify, quantify, monitor, and deep dive into consumer trends using social and search data. The scope of the project is truly impressive: 3 categories, 8 languages (30+ countries). This is a genuinely global initiative encompassing crucial elements: big data, analytical challenges, cultural nuances, methodological experiments, and an exceptionally intelligent client.
What’s the biggest misconception about your work?
A common misconception about my work is that social intelligence is easy and cheap because the data is readily available. Unfortunately, we still need to overcome these myths which we as industry leaders need to educate and help improve upon.
Social intelligence is not about reading posts or watching funny videos; it's about understanding the unique nature and behaviour of digital data. The process of digital data collection, storage, cleaning, processing, and analysis is as complex if not more as any other data type. Digital data has its own nature and behaviour that is not similar to surveys, focus groups or hard data statistics, and hence tends to require deep expertise to ‘properly’ leverage it to it’s full potential
Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)
The notion of "nightmare clients" doesn't resonate with me. It’s all about transparency and collaborating work when we can hear each other.
Social intelligence is not a silver bullet and can’t solve all business problems. But for some business questions like early-stage signals and trend detection, digital data is absolutely irreplaceable.
Most issues stem from a lack of knowledge or experience with social data. As professionals in the field, we need to explain the value of our work without getting lost in technical details. Our goal is to support good business decisions, regardless of the method used to reach them. If clients are sceptical about social data, it's usually due to a lack of understanding. It's our job to guide them through it, explaining the value of social data without delving too deep into technicalities.
Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?
I’m a huge fan of social data, and my personal firm belief is that a proper analysis of social media is a powerful source of consumer knowledge, data-driven decisions in various business applications. However, I understand that we can’t answer all questions with social data only. Here comes a great advantage of Ipsos as a global market research company with expertise in different sectors and data domains. We effectively collaborate with other Ipsos teams to cross-validate and enrich our data.
As an example, I can mention a study led by Ipsos Strategy 3 for Unilever focused on understanding the motivations & needs of digital Creators regarding sustainability. The ESG Consulting practice and Synthesio teams dug into the Creator's motivations using a combination of desk research, quantitative research, and social listening.
We do not need to forget that one of the main challenges for the entire industry is transitioning from media metrics such as mentions, engagements, and interactions to understanding genuine consumers and target audiences effectively based on that. So data hybridisation is a huge opportunity.
Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?
To my mind, Sandro Kaularz, the Chief Innovation & Product Development Officer at Ipsos Synthesio, is an undeniable genius. I’m fortunate enough to collaborate with him for over five years, albeit with some intervals in between. The evolution of social intelligence for the last ten years is considerable, and one can only marvel at Sandro’s flow of ideas for continual advancement and refinement in this ever-evolving landscape. Furthermore, Sandro is not merely a fountain of ideas but is also committed to their rigorous testing, validation as well as step-by-step implementation.
How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?
Indeed, it is hard to go against the obvious, that we are likely to follow the overarching trend of visual content and AI models, both of which hold immense potential and opportunities. The industry has significantly mastered the art of analysing and collecting text data, but there is still a vast untapped potential in the realm of visual content. Generative AI, while simplifying the analytical process, is a double-edged sword. As we witness an increasing volume of automatically generated content, one of the major challenges will be maintaining a consumer-centric focus. This brings me back to my earlier point about the importance of data hybridisation and cross-validation of sources. It's critical that we don't lose consumers from our focus.
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