What was your/career path to your current position?
Oh Man, where do I start?! First, I count this career path as such a blessing and I'm so thankful for it. It has taken me all over the world and at the same time, provided for my family. I owe a sincere and special thanks to my wife who has been so supportive over the last decade+ as I worked to carve out this path.
The short answer is this:
I started on the client side, moved to the tech side, then to the research side where I‚'ve been for the last 7 years. I‚'ve seen the social intelligence industry from all vantage points!
If you care to know the details, here's the long version!
My journey in the social intelligence space began in 2009 when I was introduced to social listening technology and became instantly captivated with the notion of harnessing the collective voice of the market for generating unique consumer insights. As mentioned, I started on the client side as a social SME at a financial services company and quickly helped the company realize tangible success with social listening, identifying and winning a customer through Twitter of all places, which was then turned into a case study by Radian6 and Salesforce.com. I was hooked, and I started to envision a career in the social listening technology space.
I remember walking into Best Buy and looking at the giant monitors and thinking, "if only I could work for a listening company and do product demos, how great would that be?!" Around that time, I became good friends with Zach Hofer-Shall (now at Twitter, as head of Twitter’s data ecosystem) when he was the leading author of the Forrester Wave Social Listening Report.
Through Zach's recommendation, I joined Visible Technologies where I worked as a Solutions Architect and became an expert on the technology (and yes, conducted hundreds of demos on a large monitor)! I was tapped by Visible's CEO to work confidentially alongside him in the M&A process as the technology expert on a series of calls with prospective buyers. What a great experience for a 29-year-old to have! After we sold Visible to Cision in 2014, I then went to Dell where we provided custom social research and consulting to our clients. It was at Dell that I focused on the healthcare market.
After gaining expertise in healthcare, I left Dell and joined DRG (acquired by Clarivate), a research & analytics firm in the healthcare and pharma space, where I was Head of Social Intelligence for about 4 years. With an amazing team, together we built a world class capability and developed new and innovative ways to apply social data to the drug commercialization process, with a key focus on emerging patient journey design and emotional journey mapping.
When my time at DRG ended, I transitioned to Ipsos Healthcare where I'm currently leading Social Intelligence for the North American market, and serving as co-lead of Ipsos Healthcare's Social Intelligence CoE, which is helping shape the methods, frameworks and structure of how social data is used across all of our healthcare customers across the globe.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Aside from generally just being super grateful for everything I've been given; my proudest achievement has been the research and publication of emerging patient journey design and the utilization of social data as a viable PRO (patient-reported outcomes) channel. In pharma, a lot of emphasis is put on peer-reviewed research and I was fortunate enough to get some work published at leading industry society ISPOR along with co-author Jaya Dulani, who is simply brilliant. It's the most meaningful because patient-reported outcomes have a lot to do with HEOR (healthcare economics and outcomes research) and proving social data's value in these avenues is where we are going as an industry next, and represents a massive shift in value creation across the industry.
What does social intelligence mean to you?
For me, it means that an organization has moved beyond 'listening' and even beyond insights to arrive at business and market intelligence that holds significant value and utility across the enterprise. Where listening is often passive, done in a vacuum, it doesn't become useful until an insights chasm is crossed, then when insights actually contribute to changes in how an organization functions, it becomes intelligence. My two cents anyway!
What's been the biggest challenge you've faced while trying to get brands to integrate social intelligence within their growth strategy?
Healthcare & Pharma companies are incredibly complex, probably the most complex of any industry, and though they spend an enormous amount of money on market research in preparation for bringing a new drug to market (with no guarantee that the drug will be approved), they've often relied on primary market research as a rule of thumb. In this way, the biggest challenge is one of education, showing traditional market researchers and marketers embedded within these companies the utility that social data brings in answering business questions in this environment. The good news is that the industry is beginning to really embrace social intelligence, and though they're still in the 'walk' phase of the crawl, walk, run model, they just need some additional hand holding to further accelerate adoption and realize social data's full potential.
What do you think is the biggest missed opportunity for social intelligence?
That more people aren't working in the field! Let's continue to create awareness for this great career path!
What's on the cards for you and your team/organisation in 2022?
Though I can't divulge the larger strategic roadmap, the first thing I'll say is expansion. I recently hired 6 new people and will be continuing to build the team in 2022 and beyond, so if you have healthcare and pharma chops, drop me a note! Secondly, we're keenly focused on the intersection of non-social data sources in healthcare with social data. An example is primary market research data, both qual and quant, RWE data (real-world evidence like claims data, EHR data, etc.) and other data sources relevant to healthcare researchers, paired with social data. We'll also be rolling out new frameworks as part of the Ipsos Healthcare Social Intelligence CoE, holding webinars and contributing to wider industry thought leadership!
How do you see social intelligence and its use evolving?
I'm hopeful that soon, social intelligence will not be treated as this different thing, but simply an extension of the patient and physicians' natural voice. We are getting there! Within the context of developing new therapies for different disease states, I see social intelligence playing a critical role in healthcare economics and outcomes research (HEOR) in the next 3-5 years. This shift will create an entirely new value story to pharma, especially as we start to publish more peer-reviewed research that's rooted in social data.
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