How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
It was just happenstance initially. While I was leading social for DraftKings, social intelligence was still a newer concept and became a small component of my day-to-day. Since then, I've held other positions (mostly in tech startups) that included components of SI, but it has now become my full-time role. The last two years I've focused primarily on social intelligence and operations as a practice in a center of excellence role at Keurig Dr Pepper.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
I was given the opportunity to evaluate and build out how KDP approaches social listening as a function. This was an incredibly rewarding opportunity (and continues to be) as I've worked to formalize our strategy, build our tech stack, create organization and process, as well as developing the program vision.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
We use social listening to provide real-time analysis of digital conversation to inform business decisions like campaign strategy, product innovation, and cultural integration opportunities. Additionally, we use social data to protect the reputation of our company and 100+ brands and work to consistently elevate the voice of the consumer via our research.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
I certainly see continued growth and advancement of our program roadmap. We are planning to expand the team, continue to invest in tech, and are moving from a more 'organized' approach (focused on brand health, competitive health, campaign measurement) to an 'operational' approach, allocating more bandwidth to customer experience, holistic marketing strategy, and real-time activation.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
I would recommend finding the whitespace for data and be as focused as possible in your approach. This is critical, especially during the early stages. Brands want actionable insights. The more you can develop your practice and approach to deliver on that, the more obvious the value proposition becomes. In addition, teams should identify quicker wins and scale, while continuing to test and learn what works for your organization. Social intelligence data can be very overwhelming because there so much of it and so many ways to approach using it. As you get started, be intentional, concise and focus on finding more unique insights that can quickly provide value.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
From a reporting standpoint, I'd recommend teams lean into visualization and display. I've found that the more digestible and aesthetically appealing social data is, the more interest and intrigue you get from members of the organization (leadership included). At KDP, we are fortunate enough to have a physical command centers that help to bring data to life. In a remote environment, we have leveraged live reports from our listening platform to share real-time visual dashboards that can be easily accessed and shared.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
I anticipate and hope that the discipline becomes more mainstream and eventually a permanent pillar within any organization's data and insights function. There's tremendous inherit value and the more we can democratize access to the technology, the brighter the future becomes for social intelligence. You can already see the growth as more companies open specific roles for this function and invest in the tools to help scale operations. Despite already coming a long way, I feel like many companies are just scraping the surface.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
Social data creates so many potential unlocks and opportunities. It can help complement existing data sources and provide a way to understand consumers on a more authentic and organic level. Social is truly 'where the action is' and can be a place of honesty and sincerity especially when it comes to feedback, reviews, opinions around products and brands. If you want to be a brand that stays relevant and truly listens to customers, social intelligence is critical for growth.
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