What does social intelligence mean to you?
Social Intelligence involves uncovering what truly matters to customers by analyzing their unfiltered conversations in social "town squares." This approach offers brands a less biased form of research, tapping into authentic perspectives. Unlike traditional research methods that often take months, Social Intelligence delivers instant feedback, allowing brands to make agile and timely decisions. Applying analytical rigor and transforming social data into actionable insights are essential for brands to understand what resonates most with their audience. Additionally, Social Intelligence can challenge internal assumptions by revealing evidence of organic customer sentiment that may contradict a brand's perceived strengths, compelling them to adapt and better meet customer needs. By monitoring industry conversations, Social Intelligence helps brands assess their competitive positioning, uncover gaps in the market, and identify areas for differentiation.
What skills do social listeners need to succeed?
To excel as a social listener, having strong technical proficiency is essential. This begins with mastering query design and recognizing the importance of clean datasets at the onset of any research project. The motto "junk in, junk out" is especially relevant when working with social data ensuring data quality is key to deriving meaningful insights. Social listeners must proactively identify and filter out "noisy" mentions that can clutter brand data, validating that the focus remains on the most relevant conversations. Problem-solving is another critical skill. Social listeners need to structure data interpretation to address complex business questions, even when the data doesn't explicitly align with how those questions are framed. Additionally, understanding the unique data and metrics available across different social channels is vital. Each platform has distinct privacy policies that influence what data is accessible, so knowing these limitations helps set clear stakeholder expectations about what insights your research can provide.
Biggest challenge to social intelligence adoption in brands?
A significant challenge lies in addressing the lack of understanding regarding the value of social intelligence. Often perceived as a "nice-to-have" rather than a critical component of decision-making, many brands view social intelligence as supplementary. This perception is compounded by difficulties in quantifying its ROI, as the direct impact of insights on revenue or purchase journey cycles can be harder to demonstrate. Additionally, teams accustomed to traditional market research methods may resist recognizing social intelligence as a credible and valuable research approach.
Favourite use case for social intelligence and what decisions can the insight help support?
Product Development and Innovation: Social intelligence enables the collection of customer feedback and the identification of unmet needs or product pain points from organic social conversations. By collaborating with product management teams, these insights can directly influence product roadmaps. This approach supports decisions such as prioritizing features or improvements, launching new products aligned with emerging trends or consumer demand, and resolving recurring issues to enhance satisfaction. In the fast-paced and competitive tech industry, the ability to swiftly track customer sentiment and pinpoint friction points in the customer journey is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge and sustaining brand leadership.
What piece of advice would you give to those looking to do more with social data than just brand tracking or campaign monitoring?
Start with business questions, not just data. Shift your focus from just tracking metrics to addressing specific business challenges or opportunities. Ask questions like: What do customers need that we aren’t providing? How are competitors filling gaps we’ve overlooked? What emerging trends could disrupt our industry? I would also suggest prioritizing building cross-functional collaboration early in your social intelligence journey. Share social insights with teams beyond marketing, such as product, R&D, customer service, and executive leadership. Show how social data can inform decisions across the entire organization, not just within campaigns.
Gen AI in social listening: hype or helpful?
Super helpful! Often, teams may not have the budget to bring in vendors for research support. In such cases, leveraging GenAI can be a game-changer, especially for quickly identifying the thematic landscape of a conversation. During a PR crisis, when time is of the essence, manually sifting through massive datasets to uncover emerging themes isn’t feasible. GenAI can expedite this process by providing an initial overview of the key themes, allowing you to quickly segment the data and validate findings. This significantly reduces the time to actionable insights and helps teams respond more effectively.
If we could grant you one wish to help your social intelligence practice succeed, what would you ask for?
I would ask for an affordable and scalable solution for analyzing video content, as this remains a significant challenge in our market. The high costs associated with generating video transcripts and storing the resulting data are major barriers. With video-based platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram dominating American markets(particularly among younger generations) valuable insights often go untapped in our research efforts. Having the ability to efficiently extract multiple relevant brand insights from a single video would add depth and richness to datasets, enhancing the overall value and comprehensiveness of our research capabilities.
If you were to start your social intelligence team from scratch what three things would you do first?
First, choose a listening platform that not only provides the functionality to efficiently collect and analyze data but also demonstrates a commitment to driving innovation in the social intelligence industry. Your platform partner should not only enable you to conduct research successfully but also collaborate with you to pioneer new, market-leading approaches to social intelligence. Second, dedicate sufficient time to building a comprehensive listening library with high accuracy and relevance to the conversations you aim to monitor. Investing effort upfront to get this right will save significant time later by minimizing the need to revisit and refine your topics or queries. Lastly, establish a network of cross-functional stakeholders and gather their top use cases to pilot social insights. Securing their buy-in early helps demonstrate the value of social intelligence, ensuring it becomes a long-term, impactful asset for your business.
What are you looking forward to in social listening for 2025?
I'm excited about the deeper integration of AI and automation in social intelligence. Leveraging AI-driven models to forecast trends, customer behavior, and potential crises will enable brands to adopt proactive strategies instead of reactive ones. I'm also looking forward to advancements in sentiment and emotion analysis, which will capture more nuanced emotional states like frustration, excitement, or sarcasm, offering richer insights into customer attitudes. Additionally, tools that better account for cultural nuances, slang, and regional variations will enhance the global accuracy of insights. Lastly, access to new and emerging platforms will be critical in expanding social intelligence coverage, ensuring brands stay ahead in understanding their audiences.
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