How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
Having received a biotechnology undergraduate degree, I went to a basic medical sciences school at the University of Madras to do a postgraduate in Molecular biology. After the post-graduation program, I took the unlikely corporate route to get some real-life experience. Then, I had an opportunity to grow, manage more people, learn new areas of work, new applications of analytics, etc. After about 5 years of doing clinical trial analytics for Informa, I had moved to Indegene specialized in regulatory, clinical data with a heavy bent of mind towards automation (data scraping, harvesting, cleansing and visualization). In the last 6 years with Novartis - played different roles such as Business Senior Analyst, Manager, Senior Manager and currently, Group leader for Social media listening and analytics. I still attribute much of my landing here to a happy accident.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
It's hard to choose just one, that's like specifying a favorite between mom and dad. I think about those moments of innovation, discovery, opportunities, collaboration, selling ideas to leadership that have helped transform small-scale proof of concepts to enterprise solutions in my various roles.
I wanted to embrace the new age technology in the analytics field and knew the unmet need areas of business. Novartis fed my appetite for innovation; I am incredibly proud to be one of the core members of launching social media listening and analytics with the support of organizational leaders and a dynamic 'Team'. The service brings together thought leaders, domain experts, data scientists, UX designers and the business teams to help uncover actionable insights from larger unstructured social media data to create an impact on patients' lives.
How is your organisation using social data to support business decision-making?
Firstly, my organization has built a robust governance body, SM council to manage data privacy, data ethics, SM guidelines, reporting AEs as per global/country regulations that are fully aligned to the organization code of ethics principles and commitments. Social insights allow us to effectively integrate information and build value for the customers by discerning patient unmet needs, social media strategies, improving product offerings, and expanding treatment access.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organisation?
In my view, uptake of social insights usage across the organization would be sophisticated to aid the understanding of patient community, predicting what customers are next going to demand of us, bolster omnichannel engagement strategies, combating misinformation, pairing social listening with edge computing concepts to garner valuable insights.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organisational buy-in?
I believe, put purpose at the core of your strategy that would augment the key business questions and design the framework including right data, frequency, methods, resources, guidelines, right balance of artificial intelligence/human intelligence, centralized approach to triangulate the findings with various existing knowledge. Build value creation that addresses your organization priorities, establish the right community forums to gather needs from thought leaders, diverse functions, raise awareness and take the synergies of small scale PoCs that can be tied to your organization's visionary/innovator programs, thereby social data becomes part of your organization data strategy.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organisations doing social intelligence?
Many companies have become besotted with data - because there is huge data, uncertainty on the usage, stage of awareness and the laundry list go on. A few things to touch are moving away from siloed to enterprise, the knack of using AI, encouraging disruptors in the untapped areas such as new social channels, data ethics, non-English data, and scalable UI. Considering all this, we are today at the precipice of an asset valuation boom and watch out for this advertently.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
I would be inquisitive to watch more developments in the evolving areas such as behavioral science, deep learning models for images, videos, pre-trained multilingual models, new data sources from audio social networks, ephemeral content and predicting early warning signals in this field. The upshot, 'Personalization will be paramount'.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
In simple terms, try to be an innovator in this rapidly evolving field to harness the tandem of big data and drive quicker strategies in consumer personification, touchpoint interventions, competitive insights, launch tracking, recruitment, and partnership with stakeholders of your respective ecosystem to meet your company's growth vision. Implement an innovator or early adopter strategy to influence your consumers. Good luck!
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