What does social intelligence mean to you?
For me, social intelligence means identifying useful insights and creating a clear picture of a certain topic, news, organisation, or individual based on social media data discussing it. Whether it’s text, images, videos, or emojis, all forms of social media content can reveal useful information for the client. Summarising this data in a concise analysis is an invaluable tool for companies that are short on time and don’t have the knowledge and resources to sort through such vast amounts of data.
What motivates you in your work? What makes you want to keep working in social intelligence?
I’m curious by nature and always want to find out more about how people are reacting to the news, how online movements start and grow, and what are the latest trends and interests that users are discussing around the world. Working in social media intelligence offers me the chance to look beyond a single viral post making the headlines and find out what movement it inspired among users and what could be the takeaways for the companies I work with.
In my work in due diligence and reputation risk at InsightX, I analyse the social media history of celebrities, athletes and high-profile individuals to highlight any potential red flags and reputational risks of working with them. I find it very interesting to build a profile of the person’s social media presence over the years, how it evolved, the causes they care about, and how they present themselves online.
What do you think makes you successful in your work?
I’m really thorough in my research and always make sure I go the extra mile to cover all possible platforms, languages and keywords that will bring up the best social media data for the analysis I’m working on.
When I find a thread of interesting social data via a keyword, hashtag or image I didn’t think of initially, I will go back and research the same in alternative ways across all platforms and relevant languages.
I find that my journalism background makes a big difference in my work: it helps me question my findings, ask myself questions to get the best possible results, look for several data proofs, and follow the hints I get from the data to get to the bigger picture and present the data and insights in a comprehensive but clear form to the client.
What are the key skills that have contributed to your success?
- Having a strong knowledge of how to research social data using keywords, hashtags, handles, and image-based searches
- Being up to date with social media platforms’ continues updates
- My foreign language skills have been a huge differentiating factor in working with international clients to help them gather insights from communities in different locations who might use different platforms or engage with different types of content.
- My writing skills from my journalism and copywriting experience have been essential to present the data in a concise and clear way for the client.
What makes social data special compared to other data sources?
Both traditional qualitative and quantitative research takes time and I find they are more limiting in the range of samples you can access. Instead, with social data, it’s possible to analyse a broad range of data in a few minutes following an event. Social data makes it possible to have access to international audiences across various generations to research their interests, thoughts and reactions in all sorts of formats (text, audio, video etc.), thus providing a much more complete picture.
What does being a social intelligence pioneer mean in the context of your work?
Social media is a fast-changing world, so staying on top of where the conversation is happening, and where people are connecting and sharing their thoughts is key because that is where the best insights will come from and where companies will want to invest money and time. Social media intelligence pioneers need to constantly think of new ways to research, analyse and save this data via manual desktop research and listening tools to create best practices for the industry.
When it comes to reputational risk and due diligence research, which is our area of expertise at InsightX, social media data is still a fairly new addition to investigative research tools in the industry and certainly one that few due diligence providers are using in the way we do. Thanks to my expertise we started using social media data as part of our research process, offering a more complete picture and unique insights in our reports offering a one-of-a-kind product in the due diligence space for sports and culture.
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