Wendy Scherer

What is your job title? How do you use social listening in your work?

My title is Founder + Managing Partner of The Social Studies Group. Social listening IS my work! I use it to support strategic planning, marketing and public relations efforts, to augment and inform primary research, for monitoring purposes, and in many other ways to support clients’ needs.

What’s your background? How did you get into social listening?‍

My career started in advertising; I was a partner in a large firm as an account director and strategic planner. I adopted the title interim director of research when my colleague went on maternity leave. At the time, I realized:

+ There was an enormous need for distilled, accurate information for account planners
+ Digital sources were largely untapped; few people knew how to wrangle them
+ My peers were afraid of the emerging internet/technology
+ My love and knowledge of online systems was an asset: I had CompuServe and AOL at home in the early days, was a big USEnet user, and ran digital reporting for DRTV ads, a position that required hourly data uploads in the late 1980s. I worked on the ‘radical’ General Electric’s consumer online account in the early 90’s.

I founded my first research agency in 1995 and was hired to use social listening to learn  Bonnie Raitt fans on USEnet. Much of our early work was secondary research/literature reviews and in response to client needs. Over time, we created a novel methodology to monitor digital mentions and value long before it became part and parcel with industry offerings.

What’s been the project you’ve been most proud to work on?‍

It’s hard to choose one; here is one paid project and one pro bono:

Ongoing knowledge and crisis management project for a large pizza chain during the first months of the pandemic. We provided extensive monitoring, daily reporting, and led frequent updates and deep discussions with the executive team about consumers’ state of mind, food delivery, and the industry. It was incredible working with a team of extraordinarily smart and team-oriented people whose goal it was to protect their staff and serve the public (not just to sell pizza!) while staying in business during those early, precarious months.

I’m proud of my work for Tri-Faith, a national. Model for interfaith learning, collaboration, and celebration. They are making religious pluralism a social norm by convening diverse communities, encouraging candid conversations, and building bold partnerships to fill critical gaps. We have been entrusted with social intelligence and monitoring that informs and feeds their work with an extensive alert system and identification of the strongest voices in their primary issues, mapping the path of content amplification. We have outlined comparative linguistics, which promotes key learnings about how to communicate clearly and be understood in the space to the myriad of audiences.

What’s the biggest misconception about your work?

The biggest misconception about my work is that monitoring and tracking are the pillars of our charter. We do that, of course. But the primary work that we do is decoding huge datasets of conversations and delivering insights and action oriented direction and consultation. We are in the business of providing clarity and direction, not data.

Any nightmare clients? Why? (No names)

I’ve had lots of clients with nightmare deadlines and some with outlandish expectations, but no nightmare clients!

Early in my career, I did work for a lovely author (Rufus Goodwin, who has since passed). He wasn’t a nightmare  but he did not have email. It’s true! We would speak on the phone to scope projects ,and then I had to print and mail him all the research work I did for him. It was sort of charming.

Is there anything that you’re doing with social data that you don’t see others doing? Any missed opportunities?‍

We have a practice for identifying changes in bespoke ‘social universes’ to quickly and nimbly identify new content ideas or concerns/crises/novelties. We’ve been improving on this for years and it has been extremely valuable to our clients. I don’t see others doing this with a strategic/human lens. AI is certainly shifting this playing field, although I believe nothing replaces solid reasoning and category expertise, at least not yet.

Who has made a lasting impression on you? Any SI heroes?

‍So many people have made a lasting impression on me in this business. I’ve been fortunate to have worked with some of the greats. But to choose one, I’d have to say that Jim Reynolds, VP Sales at Blackbird.ai, has had an incredible impact on my career. He has always been incredibly dialed into the ins-and-outs of the industry and has been there to debate with and bounce ideas off – sometimes crazy ideas that didn’t even seem possible. Learning from him, and alongside him, made me better at what I do. And, it reinforced the value of mentors and mentorship, things that are often overlooked in today’s environment.

How do you think the social intelligence industry will evolve in the next few years?

‍I expect that we will continue to see brands and clients embrace social intelligence as a discipline and that  we will begin to see teams of research and analytics advocates across departments working together for greater access, collaborative studies, and shared information and insights.

I believe that AI will continue to affect change in our industry, as it will in so many industries. However, I believe that the social intelligence industry will evolve more due to deeper understanding and more disciplined practice. While the tools will always be important, the stars in our industry who are developing strong use cases, best practices, and gaining traction will be key.

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