What does social intelligence mean to you?
To me, social intelligence is the art of perceiving and interpreting the emotional states, experiences, and perspectives of people. It forms a background to evaluate human behavior, human traits, culture, and intentions of a user. In a world where people are more open than ever, sharing their thoughts freely on social media, social intelligence gives us an authentic, unbiased view of what they really feel and think. By using social intelligence with traditional enterprise data, marketers can gather insights and make more intelligent decisions about how to target and develop specific messages that resonate with their customers. If analyzed with the right methodology, social media data becomes actionable insights through which a company can close the perception gap with customers and build a greater loyal base. Brands that put social intelligence at the core of their customer experience strategy can really understand their audiences-doing so opens the doors to deeper connections and better business results.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
Analytical Thinking: Social listeners need to be able to look at and analyze huge amounts of social-based data-trends, patterns, and insights that can translate into useful business decisions.
Critical Thinking: One needs to have the ability to question the assumptions, analyze the quality of the information at hand, and interpret the data-in single or multiple-angles-to appreciate the real sentiment underlying social media conversations.
Emotional Intelligence: A social listener ideally would be someone who can understand the human emotions and reactions and therefore empathize with the users into emotional cues in conversations.
Communication Skills: The ability to convey insights and recommendations clearly to teams, stakeholders, or clients is important, enabling the recipient to act upon the findings.
Technical Proficiency: Understanding of various social media listening tools and analytics is a must, being aware that you must set monitoring parameters and know how to track relevant conversations to interpret results.
Attention to Detail: Social listening might involve looking through the massive data; therein, the eye for details would be significant so that one may miss no important information.
Cultural Awareness: Being culturally aware-in terms of understanding the nuances of different cultures, languages, and societal contexts-will create a more appropriate interpretation of social media conversations, thereby minimizing misinterpretations.
Problem-Solving: Social listeners are in a position to take these findings and apply solutions to real business problems, be it a brand crisis, customer pain points, or an opportunity of improvement, and attempt resolution accordingly.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
The challenge for brands when trying to adopt social intelligence lies in the intricacies of data and the limitations of analyzing rich media content, which differ from text and are thus hard and tedious with regard to images and videos and audio. Fundamentally, social data is influenced and subjected to keyword logic. And this unveils much of the problem with social data regarding quality and accuracy of insights, the result is reciprocation of what is being fed. Team members often don't know how to triangulate social data with more traditional enterprise data, which limits the ability to create a full, unified view of customer behavior. Additionally, social media platform policies can limit access to data or make it difficult to track conversations across various channels, further complicating the process. Finally, generating actionable insights can be challenging, particularly when dealing with long-form content, as context can be lost in the process, making it harder to extract meaningful takeaways. All of these barriers hinder brands' abilities to fully capitalize on social intelligence for integration into holistic marketing and customer experience strategies.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
My preferred use of social intelligence is customer perception studies. By analyzing conversations, reviews, and feedback on social media, brands can, first-hand, gain insight into their customers' honest feelings toward their products, services, and the overall brand experience. Such real-time and unadulterated information enable businesses to have insight into customer sentiments and possibly identify the areas where they need to improve.
Additionally, social intelligence can be a determining factor in crisis monitoring and management. When negative sentiments start to rise or when there is potential trending of issues on the social platforms, brands can respond to the situation almost instantly by assessing it, understanding its root cause, and taking adequate steps to proactively address concerns raised by their customers. This real-time insight allows for such companies to address risky situations before they escalate into a full-blown crisis.
Furthermore, direct insight into the wants and needs of the customer through social intelligence allows brands to listen directly to their audience without the filter of surveys or market insights. This adds depth to the comprehension of consumer demands, desires, and annoyances, impacting parts of marketing strategy, product development, and customer service enhancements.
In summary, social intelligence insights can support executive decisions, strategies, brand reputation management, and higher customer satisfaction.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
Triangulating enterprise data like sales and website traffic, customer service data with social media data which will allow for exploration of nuanced insight. Similarly, use other data sources like research artifacts and trend reports to validate the inference with social insights
Social data can also be used to track customer journeys and pinpoint pain points. Tone, emotion, and context analysis will give a more authentic insight into user intent so you could create a more personal experience.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
In my opinion, Generative AI (GenAI) has a genuine role to play in social listening. GenAI has immense potential to transform the way we process and analyze social data.One of its most powerful applications is its ability to generate insights from vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. While traditional social listening tends to take time and even become laborious, GenAI can easily and quickly surface dominant themes, trends, and sentiments across big data, saving a lot of human effort while providing quick insights and useful recommendations.
The other significant benefit of GenAI is clustering topics-it can unite discussions and topics with no manual input. Thus, it diminishes the bias that human categorization might introduce and allows online conversations' analysis to be more well-rounded.
The GenAI can yield incredible results in the generation of content ideas, depending on UGC. It can analyze everything being said about a brand, product, or industry while identifying major themes and content gaps, inspiring new marketing campaigns or content strategies that directly align with what the audience is discussing.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
I would ask for a stable, standardized process of measuring and tracking any potential ROI coming from social intelligence initiatives. One of the biggest challenges in this domain is the quantification of the value realized through social intelligence investments. Quite often, the insights and the changes derived from social listening cannot always be directly linked to measurable business outcomes, which makes it extremely hard to go on investing or to display the entire impact of such initiatives.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
Establish Clear Objectives and Business Alignment: define the use cases for social intelligence
Select and Implement the Right Tools and Platforms
Build a Skilled, Cross-Functional Team
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
In 2025, I look forward to the evolution of technologies capable of analyzing video content. As social media platforms continue to trend more toward video-based formats such as Stories or Shorts, it will be increasingly important to analyze these video assets according to sentiment, brand mentions, and context. Tools capable of decoding visual and audio cues in videos in conjunction with text-based content will provide a more complete understanding of audience sentiment and engagement.
I will also be interested in the potential application of GenAI to data validation and insight validation. One of the problems that social listening really faces now and over the years is ensuring that the insights gleaned from social listening are accurate and relevant. GenAI can aid in real-time verification of these insights by validating patterns, improving data quality, and ensuring that the conclusions reached are consistent with the broader context. This will ensure that the insights provide more actionable and reliable outcomes.
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