How did you get into social intelligence? What was your career path to your current position?
I currently lead the Social Intelligence team at Delta Air Lines. In this role, I help to leverage social media data to learn more about Delta customers and provide real-time insights to stakeholders throughout the company. Prior to joining Delta, I worked at the National Hockey League (NHL), where I oversaw social media analytics for the league. Before that, I worked in social and digital roles with both Major League Baseball (MLB) and USA Today.
What's your proudest achievement of your career to date?
Throughout my career, I've been fortunate to work on some amazing projects with some incredible teammates. While at Delta, I'm especially proud of the work that our team has been able to do with social intelligence during the pandemic. The past two years have been challenging for our industry, and our team has developed so many innovative approaches to measure and surface insights to the broader organization. It's been so rewarding to see how our team has adapted to new circumstances and delivered work that has informed key decisions across Delta.
How is your organization using social data to support business decision-making?
The Social Intelligence team at Delta is structured as a Center of Excellence. We work with stakeholders across the organization to leverage social media insights in different ways. There are so many different applications for social media data, especially at an organization such as Delta, so we are fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate with a variety of partners. Whether that's monitoring real-time reaction to a new on-board product, identifying potential surprise and delight opportunities or using predictive modelling to forecast upcoming travel trends, we use social insights in many different ways and we're continually looking for new opportunities to leverage social media data to help us better understand our customers.
Looking into 2022, what are your expectations for how social intelligence is going to support your organization?
Social media has served a key role in helping us to better understand our audience at Delta, especially during the pandemic. As it relates to travel, COVID-19 has brought about so many new policies and processes, and social media has provided a valuable lens to help us better understand customer perceptions of this shifting landscape. Looking ahead to 2022, I'm especially excited about some of the work that our team is doing around audience research, trendspotting analysis and predictive modelling. As we see travel demand continue to rebound, there are some great opportunities for our team to leverage social media data as a way to gain a deeper understanding of our audiences and to better contextualize emerging industry trends.
What's your view on how to develop social intelligence and get organizational buy-in?
As someone working in social media intelligence, my job is not to build dashboards or deliver reports. Instead, my job is to help inform decision making. I would argue that organizational buy-in is the most important aspect of my job. At the end of the day, our team‚'s analysis is only effective if we have alignment and stakeholder buy-in. Throughout my career, I've found that it's best to start by meeting with stakeholders, understanding their needs, then working backwards from that to develop a solution. Anchoring my work to those needs helps me demonstrate value, and ultimately leads to broader organizational buy-in.
What piece of advice would you give to others working within organizations doing social intelligence?
My advice is to approach everything with the audience in mind. It's never been more important to understand your audience and their shifting needs, pain points and perceptions. Social media provides a valuable first-hand view of what your audience is thinking and it provides that view at scale and in real-time. As social intelligence professionals, we're tasked with representing that audience voice. Keeping that top of mind and always tying things back to the audience helps position you for success.
Where would you like to see the discipline of social intelligence going in the future?
The industry has evolved so much in recent years, and I'm excited to see where things head in the future. Two themes that I'm especially excited about are around social data integrations and around predictive work. At a high level, there's been a coalescing of tools and services across the industry. Cision's acquisition of Brandwatch and Meltwater's acquisition of Linkfluence are just two recent examples. There's a movement to view social media data in a broader context, alongside other complimentary datasets. Ultimately, I think that this broader view of the data helps to provide a more complete picture of the audiences we’re measuring and ultimately helps facilitate better analysis. I'm also really excited about some of the developments we've seen around predictive capabilities in the social intelligence space. There's been some great work done with predictive modelling across the industry, helping to transform analysis from reactive and descriptive to predictive and prescriptive. Ultimately, social media data is most useful when it can be used to inform upcoming decisions. I think that more accurate predictability has the potential to truly change how social media data can be leveraged within organizations.
What would you say to business leaders about why they should be incorporating social intelligence into their growth strategies?
The adage is that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. With social media, you're able to look into that room and see that conversation as it's happening. Every day, there are millions of unprompted opinions shared to social media platforms across the world. With a social intelligence program, you're able to quantify this conversation in real-time to gain a better understanding of what your customers, and potential customers, think of your brand. In a vacuum, social media data won't answer all questions, and it isn't intended to solve for everything. But when leveraged in strategic ways, a social intelligence program provides valuable insights that can drive meaningful business results.
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