What does social intelligence mean to you?
To me, and simply put, social intelligence is the art and science of making sense of unstructured digital data. While pairing art with data might seem odd, at its core, it’s what it’s all about.
A practice that involves designing the right research methodology and questions, ensuring data is accurately collected and thoroughly analysed, and ultimately crafting a clear narrative that explains the "why" behind the rich consumer data that digital spaces offer and sets actionable directions for future strategies and/or business decisions.
What are you doing that no-one else is to drive the social intelligence industry forward?
As digital spaces and social platforms evolve - from an increase in video content to the growing fragmentation of audiences - a significant focus of mine has been leveraging the power of the latest technological advancements to a) go beyond text analysis and b) design a more tailored approach to social listening that better mirrors the current state of audiences in digital spaces - communities vs a single audience. The latter has been particularly key in helping our clients understand different ‘weak’ signals emerging from these communities and in designing more effective, tailored strategies to drive growth, from social presence to product development.
Currently, also exploring ways of designing bespoke models that combine social data with Gen AI to deliver faster and more effective solutions for our clients. There’s a big learning curve ahead, with all the limitations that we’re all aware of as of now, but the potential is also huge and exciting.
It's the year 2030: What does the practice of social listening look like?
Firstly, the platforms and the elements we will be using as inputs will be slightly different as the digital spaces continue to evolve.
From a more technical and practical perspective, significant tech advancements will lead to a much more agile and accurate process when it comes to collecting the data - in all its different forms - ensuring greater relevance of the dataset with less manual work in both data collection and analysis. I expect to see a shift away from crafting killer Boolean queries or search strings to mastering the skills of prompting tools to help find and analyse the data. And while some may claim that the growing integration of AI with tools and our reliance on it may lead to uniform results, I like to believe that it will actually lead to more tailored, richer, and effective outputs, as I expect the tools to give us more room for customisation (e.g., through our prompts, bespoke trained models).
Now, if the internet becomes sentient - or something close to it - by that time, as some predict, then the changes will be much bigger across the board. Even so, I still think we will be the conductors of such an orchestra of data.
What is the most common question you are helping your clients answer?
How can we grow and sustain our cultural relevance in this day and age and beyond? Which communities should we engage with to drive brand and commercial growth, and how?
Have you got a favourite social intelligence use case or case study from the last year?
Given its scale and business impact, I would highlight a multi-market social listening project I designed and led for one of the world’s largest FMCG companies to inform portfolio development and social strategy.
This comprehensive research piece involved collaboration with other social intelligence professionals across our group network, utilising diverse tools, features, and approaches to provide a clear understanding of market-specific preferences and unmet needs. Plus, these insights were also mapped against the most valuable social communities for the business, guiding future social activities.
The findings are now being used to inform local portfolio development and social strategies and, as such, I believe this project is a great example of how social intelligence can deliver significant business impact on a large scale and how collaboration between social intelligence professionals can also lead to greater outputs.
They say to be great you need to read around your subject – what are you currently reading or your favourite book and what insights have you been able to apply to your work?
Contagious by Jonah Berger. I read it a while ago, but the learnings I gained from it are still highly relevant in my day-to-day work. The principles outlined in the book provide me with a great framework for some of the projects I’ve worked on, helping me identify what to focus on, the key 'whys' to explore, and how to frame the insights so they are action-oriented.
If you had to share three emojis that summed up social intelligence, what would they be?
🧑🔬🖼️💡
What advice would you give to a brand who wanted to create an internal social intelligence team?
Since social intelligence can take different shapes and forms depending on its applications, I’d recommend starting by defining your business priorities and identifying where social intelligence can add the most value.
Next, gain a solid understanding of the tools available and invest in the ones that best address your needs. Third, ensure your team includes curious, trained/experienced social intelligence professionals.
Lastly, don’t treat it as a siloed department. Create opportunities for other departments and units to understand its potential and contributions - many may not be aware of its value initially, but the potential for collaboration and its impact can be significant.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
Particularly keen to see - and explore myself - how AI will continue to be integrated into social intelligence practices and the opportunities it will bring.
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