What was your journey/career path to your current position?
My journey started with a rather classic Market Research education and first experiences with online-focused full-service market research agencies. When joining Ipsos in 2008, I got really excited about the emerging domain of passive metering and user generated data and started to explore the art of the possible with a few colleagues. Shortly after I was given the opportunity to develop new capabilities and analytic frameworks for this new field in an intrapreneurial set-up. That's what I got stuck with for the last decade - my passion to explore further and test the boundaries for user generated data seems infinite.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
The impact - small and large - we generate for our client's business is the constant source of pride for me. Eventually, this is the single fuel that facilitated the fast growth of our practice in recent years. We started with a few passionate geeks and are recognized as the Leader in the AI enabled consumer intelligence category by Forrester today with more than 300 dedicated experts across the globe and long-lasting partnerships with leading clients in the social insights space. Beyond, developing a new machine learning based method for Innovation Whitespace discovery with the MIT followed by a publication in Innovation Science journal and a Wikipedia entry for the new method was a special moment that I look back to with joy and pride.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
The evolution from Social Listening to Social Intelligence is way more than a new catchphrase or a new way of marketing Social Insight technologies. Whilst Social Listening (1st wave) is typically the automation of the collection of large social media datasets, Social intelligence (2nd wave) is positioned higher on the insight value chain as it provides actionable insights for specific business cases empowered by the combination of machine and human intelligence. AI-enabled consumer intelligence marks the next stage (3rd wave) with the blend of diverse data sets, AI models at scale and predictive analytics.
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
The challenges changed quite a bit over time. In the early days, the main adoption hurdles were all around representativeness, social data coverage and the insight value of social data overall. Today there is no shortage in data (on the contrary there is data obesity), but now many large organizations are longing for more revelations and less observations from big consumer data. Most Social Intelligence capabilities are doing a great job in accumulating data, but they are not designed to create concrete business impact. Getting true value from social data is strongly bound to dedicated expert resources (e.g., data scientists or cultural analysts) that most organizations lack today.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
There are quite a few. Brands are looking for guidance on how to embed social intelligence in the corporate insight culture. As an industry, we are cutting the corners when it comes to advisory services and best practice guidance on how to effectively integrate the beauty of big consumer data in our clients' organizations. Another missed opportunity is the use case around front-end innovation and cultural intelligence. The social data ecosystem can be an incredibly rich and powerful data universe to address insight needs around those use cases once the right analytic lens is applied.
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
This year will be big for us. Over the past years we have been busy with the transformation of our inhouse developed data science techniques in the area of Semantic AI and Predictive Modelling into the Synthesio platform. In the course of 2022, we will continue to release new capabilities that will define new standards in terms of predictive analytics and data integration with social, survey, search and behavioral data available in the platform. Beyond, we will introduce a new user experience organized around use cases (e.g., Trend Discovery & Prediction) based on the proven analytic frameworks that we developed and improved over the last decade at Ipsos.
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
The future looks bright for our industry. The new category of AI-enabled Consumer Intelligence that was recently introduced by Forrester confirms that we will be working with a more heterogenous data streams in the future. At the same time brands will require more predictive analytics that are more tied to their business performance.
Democratizing data science for real-time data in the domains of Natural Language Understanding and Predictive Analytics wrapped around a simple and intuitive platform user experience will become our future challenge in my view.
Get Social with SILab
