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[Podcast] Understanding Healthcare Conversations: Kirsten Recknagel’s Social Intelligence Journey

A Podcast Series Dedicated to the Women in Social Listening & Insights

In this podcast series, Convosphere’s CEO, Jackie Cuyvers, meets some of the leading women in the industry. Each episode delves into their unique career paths, experiences and perspectives in the ever-evolving world of social listening, market research and digital insights. This series not only highlights the significant contributions of women in the field but also serves as a platform for sharing knowledge, challenges and triumphs.

Jackie Cuyvers meets Kirsten Recknagel, Co-Founder of Essential HCP

In this episode of the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast, Jackie Cuyvers sits down with Kirsten Recknagel, co-founder of Essential HCP. Kirsten shares her expertise in leveraging social media in healthcare, the vital role of understanding conversation dynamics and the unexpected insights that drive valuable consumer understanding. Kirsten also delves into the evolving landscape of social intelligence, sharing practical advice for professionals aiming to navigate and excel in this dynamic field. From her experience in leading social intelligence endeavours to the invaluable lessons she has garnered throughout her career, Kirsten serves up essential insights and inspiration for anyone passionate about the intersection of social media and consumer understanding.

Time Stamped Overview of the Podcast

00:00 – Podcast featuring women in social intelligence industry.

05:28 – Improved social intelligence through better technological tools.

08:17 – Use social data before traditional market research.

11:34 – Creating database of physician conversations for analysis.

15:56 – Value in hearing from crowd, understanding dynamics.

17:52 – Identifying influential people in conversation dynamics.

22:32 – Millennials felt nostalgic and consumed Lunchables unexpectedly.

26:25 – Leverage cross-functional teams for diverse insights.

30:03 – Social platforms will splinter, AI will change.

32:05 – Book “Working” by Studs Terkel finds relevance.

35:21 – Emphasise social’s role in driving consumer insights.

Podcast Transcript

Jackie Cuyvers:
Welcome to the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast, where we showcase the incredible work of women working in the field of social intelligence. My name is Jackie Cuyvers, and I’ll be your host for this journey. In this podcast, we’ll be speaking with women from enterprise, agencies, and academia who are leading the charge in the world of social listening and insights. Together, we’ll be exploring their careers and the challenges they faced and overcome and the innovative solutions they’ve developed. Our goal is to provide valuable insights and advice to our listeners who are passionate about this field and committed to advancing their careers. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, you’ll find inspiration and guidance in these conversations. So sit back, relax, and get ready to learn from the women who are shaping the future of social intelligence. Let’s get started. Today, I’m joined by Kirsten Recknagel. Kirsten, would you mind taking a minute to introduce yourself?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I’m Kirsten Racknagel, and currently, I’m a cofounder of a social intelligence health care specialist company called Essential HCP. We work almost exclusively with pharmaceutical and biotech clients, And, Essential HCP stands for social healthcare professional, so we take a very focused approach to social intelligence and social data. We zero in on online conversations specifically occurring among health care professionals. So doctors, nurses, medical researchers to provide insights about health care professionals and what they’re doing, seeing, and thinking, and the decisions that they’re making. And then we’ll do the same among patients and patient advocacy organizations, and analysing their online activity as well.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So I understand that your current business is very health and and life sciences focus. But would you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you first got into the field of social intelligence?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I I didn’t always use social intelligence exclusively for pharma and health care. This is a rather new twist in in my career. Prior to forming Essential HCP, I spent about 15 years leading a different social intelligence company. That company is called MotiveQuest, and it was eventually acquired by a market particular audience or a particular industry. We mined online conversations for insights for clients in CPG and finance and technology and health care and automotive, just about any industry you can think of. We were open to all clients. In fact, in the very early days, like 2,008 or so, we even did a great study analyzing conversations among current and former methamphetamines users. And the client in that case was actually a state government, not a drug dealer. The state government was revamping their anti meth campaign and they wanted to really understand how to talk with meth users most effectively rather than just to replicate a typical antidrug campaign message. So if there’s any example out there for you can find anyone online talking about things that are interesting and valuable to just about anyone, that’s that’s a good one.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Would you say that was your most potentially taboo project or a topic area?

Kirsten Recknagel:
It was. It was it was probably the most taboo. We we joked that we should have been offering hazard pay to the team that worked on it because there was a lot of really gnarly upsetting and in many cases, highly pornographic content just by virtue of the places that we had to go to find the conversations that that we were finding valuable. But in the end, it was a really great output with a lot of really nice very humanizing insight into people who were struggling with meth addiction or people who had come out the other side of meth addiction and had really powerful messages that they would like to share with somebody who is in the throes of this awful experience. So the the output was fantastic. The process of getting there was a bit, a bit difficult, but, but it was worth it in the end.

How social intelligence has improved dramatically over time

Jackie Cuyvers:
Sounds like a a very interesting and impactful project to work on. So with this shift now that you’ve got where you’re much more focused on pharma, life sciences, and that health aspect, and and not working across all industries. What what do you think has been the biggest I mean, how how have you found that change, and and what’s been the biggest point of interest for you with that?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I will say, you know, kind of looking back, your your question earlier got me thinking back to the history of my time in in social intelligence and, like, it’s giving me very much old person back in the day vibes, like, about walking to school uphill both ways in the snow. But, you know, when I joined MotiveQuest, it was 2,006, and Facebook wasn’t in use by the general public yet. People were still communicating online on news groups, which rarely see anymore. There weren’t dashboards to facilitate social listening, and we generally had to explain to clients what online conversations were and then convince them that their customers were online or might be online. And then, of course, we had to harvest all the data ourselves. There was no Meltwater or Brandwatch or NetBase to facilitate, like, any of that data collection. And, you know, even running a sentiment analysis just because of the computing power and and how things are set up. We might have to set up a query before leaving the office for the evening and then let it run overnight. And then you just pray that you haven’t messed up your Boolean coding anywhere and it doesn’t blow up on you overnight. It was super primitive back then. And then today, you know, even with the splintering of social media platforms, we’re living in such a better time for social intelligence where, you know, our clients now know that the conversations that are happening online are valuable. They know that their customers are online, and they want to be able to use this venue to be able to get at better different insights about what makes people tick and and to learn more about people just by being able to listen to their conversations. So, I will say, although the job at its base for me really hasn’t changed, it’s always been about listening versus asking to learn more about people and what drives their decisions and their behaviours. The environment in which we’re able to do that job right now is infinitely better than it used to be.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So while the process sounds like it’s gotten much more efficient for you, and you say that now that there’s client awareness of the potential impact for this type of work or the do you find that that education piece is still essential in educating clients about the how potentially strategic or impactful this type of work can be?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I do. Sadly and surprisingly, I still find that there is still a need for client education. There are certain organizations, of course, that are steeped in social and really get the multiple layers of value that can be extracted from it. But there are still many organizations, particularly in the world of health care, which tends to be a little bit more conservative and slower to move on things like social media, where there is still an education component just to open people’s eyes to what is possible to pull out of all of this data. And I I also think that the industry overall, in terms of social intelligence, struggles a little bit with pigeonholing. Social media can do lots and lots of different things for organizations. It can serve up consumer insights about behaviours that are unrelated to social. It can serve up behavioural insights that are highly related to social media usage. It can serve up customer experience and customer service insights, etcetera. I think when different organizations think about social, they very often think about one of those flavours or the other and and sometimes kinda miss the entire big picture. So a lot of the education burden right now is helping organizations realize that this is a pool of data sitting out there for the taking that can be used in many different ways and provide value in many different ways.

Use social data before traditional market research

Jackie Cuyvers:
And in terms of providing value or where this fits with your pharma and life sciences clients, do you find yourself doing this alongside primary research or IDIs? Or do you find this comes before or after? Where do you where do you feel this is a natural fit?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I think the best natural fit is to use social data and online conversation prior to traditional market research methods like surveys or folks groups or IDIs only because, you know, when you listen to what people have to say, you very often realize that the questions you intended to ask may not have been the best questions. And so you can really optimise, I think, more traditional and frankly more expensive methods of market research just by taking a step back and listening to the online naturally occurring unprompted conversations that people have with each other first. You don’t always, of course, have the luxury of doing that because deadlines are what they are and budgeting cycles are what they are and and sometimes you slot in wherever you need to slot in. But I think, ideally, if a client team has the luxury of sequencing, social data should probably often come first and and be used not only for the insights that stand alone, but also to help optimize and get the most out of subsequent market research. Yeah.

Jackie Cuyvers:
That makes sense. Can you describe your current role and how you use social intelligence and why, you know, when you were starting your your company that you saw health and life sciences as as having this, you know, very specific need?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. Absolutely. So this is one part seeing a specific need in the market and one part, of the belief that you do better work when you’re personally interested in what you’re doing. So I do think that the pharmaceutical, biotech life sciences industry overall was starting to come around to social media and social online conversations as a source of intelligence and insights as we began to create essential HCP. This is an industry that I think has lagged a lot of its counterparts in effectively mining social insights from online conversations, but but are getting there. So the timing was was good. The other thing is that I personally just have a passion for all things media. And and so from my perspective, this felt like a good time to focus on what I really, really loved rather than serve all commerce, which I had done for many years at MotiveQuest.

Jackie Cuyvers:
How do you stop yourself from getting medical student syndrome when you’re working on one of those health programs?

Kirsten Recknagel:
I’ll tell I’ll tell you. Yeah. It’s, it’s a little difficult. One of the one of the refrains we hear most often from the patients out there is telling each other when they are newly diagnosed with just about any condition. Whatever you do, don’t Google it. You can ask questions of your community of fellow patients online, and you can ask questions of your health care providers. But whatever you do, just don’t Google whatever it is you have because the information that you find there is, a, probably gonna be somewhat outdated, and and, b, comes without all of the context and caveat that real world experiences and anecdotes and stories bring to the equation, which is which is really key, especially if you’ve got something, you know, really serious that you’re dealing with. But, yes, I I learn a lot every day, which is another part of why I really enjoy the medical content is because it is full of lots of interesting dense jargon. It’s almost like learning a new language very often and then to learn all of the implications of what it is people are talking about. It’s it’s it’s fun and it’s a great great growth engine for me personally.

Jackie Cuyvers:
And how do you gather the data? How do you work with the data? Can you can you tell us a little bit what is the day in the life of of your current role look like?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. So one of the the things that we found prior to starting social HCP was that whenever we were asked to do analyses of physicians’ conversations, you had to first go through the needle in the haystack exercise of finding the physicians among the tens of millions of people talking about a given topic online. And we thought, well, what if we could create a haystack that’s made entirely of those needles so we don’t have to go through that process every time a client asks us, tell me about the physicians, and tell me what the physicians are doing and thinking and saying. So we we actually spent a while creating a database and a data feed of online conversations happening among physicians. Many of those are named professional handles that people use online on the likes of x or Twitter. Some of those are anonymous conversations that occur in the realm of forums such as Reddit, but our our main goal was to come up with a feed of data that was consistent and accurately coming from health care professionals. And then to be able to jump into that data very quickly when we had a client say, I need to know more about this topic within the world of gastroenterologists or that event within the world of rheumatologists. So it’s it’s it’s been a fun process to build a better mouse trap, to get at some of these insights in a more effective and efficient way.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So what types of teams or departments at these different organizations are you working with? Are these brand teams? Are these the real world evidence teams? Who’s who wants to know more about what the HCPs are saying?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. You know, we found ourselves working with quite a variety of of teams. And I actually think it’s been I think part of the best projects are the ones that happen when you have a cross functional team that you work with. So, you know, in my experience, very often, working with any single point of contact in a client organization, you can sometimes lose some of the really valuable findings and and data and insights because that person doesn’t necessarily know exactly what’s gonna be useful and valuable to everybody across the organization. You know, try as they might, the job is just, you know, it it’s just big to know what everybody’s up to and everybody’s working on, what everybody would find useful. So whenever we can, we try to get teams together on our client side to have an audience of people that come from brand and insights and sales and regulatory and everybody in between just because when you walk through a body of conversations and it’s an entirely exploratory exercise, you never know what’s gonna land with different groups of people internally and end up to be unexpectedly valuable to them. So we try to work with anybody who is willing to take the time to listen to what’s going on out there in these conversations.

Jackie Cuyvers:
With this variety of stakeholders that you’re working with who all have their own objectives and their own kind of success measurements, How do you measure the success of a social listening or insights project, and what metrics could you possibly use?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. So essentially, HCP and MotiveQuest. So my entire career within the realm of of social, they were both first and foremost insights companies versus social analytics companies or customer support oriented output companies. So, you know, at bottom, we use social conversations to learn more about people, whether they’re physicians or patients or consumers, and how they interact with the world offline as much as online. So our barometer of what can constitute success is actually just pretty simple. It’s it’s really just did this client learn something new and useful to them. It could be a big revelation about fundamental motivations behind people’s big behaviours and decisions, or it could be a couple of smaller surprises and findings. Could be things like learning about the language that people are using and have come up with amongst themselves when they talk about a given topic or misperceptions that people have that hadn’t been identified previously or new companies that are emerging from the woodwork, potential competitors or potential partners that that haven’t been previously identified. Really to us, all that really matters is that clients learn something new that they can apply to their business in some way.

The importance of diverse voices in healthcare industry

Jackie Cuyvers:
And you mentioned misconceptions. So for you, what what are some of the most common misconceptions you encounter or need to overcome? Is it is it questions on representativeness? Or what types of, you know, things do you need to challenge the thinking of?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Great question. Yes. I think there is a bit of, especially in the world of healthcare, misperceptions about the value or the strength of voices that certain individuals may have. I think there’s value, number 1, in hearing from the crowd en mass. What do all of these people who are relevant to me have to say and can I distill all their conversations and figure out how has a group, this constituent, group of people seems to see the world? I think there’s also a lot of value in social in understanding the dynamics of that conversation that happens and to figure out which individuals play an interesting, unique, or leading role within that discussion or those discussions that are happening among their peers. Particularly within health care, we’re used to thinking about the world in terms of, you know, key opinion leaders. People who are experienced in their careers and have published a lot and and fit a certain kind of profile that is rather traditional in nature, to be called an influential person. And one of the things that social media has done, particularly within the world of health care, is turn that notion on its head. Now you can find resident physicians and fellows who are hyper influential in setting opinion and directing people’s attention to certain topics and in arguments online who don’t have big reputations and may not even have huge followings. They just happen to have the right followings online. So I think that that social has added a layer of understanding what influence means among your target audience. And I think that’s that’s an opportunity to reset expectations and perceptions among a lot of organizations.

Jackie Cuyvers:
And that influence that that people have across networks or their followers, that used to be measurable on platforms like X or Twitter. But as as people have migrated to newer different platforms, how do you measure or evaluate that level of influence for HCPs?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I’m kinda chuckling because this is a conversation I had with a client earlier this week, in fact. And and and we were kinda joking about the fact that that process of understanding conversation dynamics within particularly within a specialized group of people, I think, is is as much art as it is science. And the fact that you want to have a list of people on your tickler list or your hit list as to who’s influential and who bears particular attention based on a number of things. Are they good amplifiers of other people’s content? That’s important, but you also wanna find people who are originators of original independent content. You also wanna find people who are willing participants in the back and forth dialogue, who don’t just publish out of the gate and drop a bomb and let people respond to it. You want people who actually do a good job furthering the conversation and engaging in that back and forth. And so what we end up doing with clients very often in the absence of easy quantitative ways to identify people by their influence is to say, let’s construct a well rounded dinner party picture of different individuals who are relevant to this conversation and play different roles within it. And that is as much art as it is science, and unfortunately, it is not super efficient from a time perspective. You can’t click a button and get this output in terms of guests at your dinner party listening, but I think it works very well if you think about it this way, being able to target individuals who play different roles within an important conversation or series of conversations.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So thinking about these different stakeholders that you’re working with, who may sit across the organisation or come from different experience and backgrounds.

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I think as far as the skills that are essential, my answer has probably changed over the years as the world of social media and social media tools have evolved so much. In the early days, you had to do a lot more planning and a lot more of the tedious work manually. And now that we have great dashboard tools and those dashboards are increasingly integrating AI to do some of the heavy lifting on the more tedious work. Now you can typically jump in much faster and get to the fun part faster, which is getting your hands on the right data and figuring out what’s going on in it and what’s important about it. Now I’d say your most essential skills are curiosity and stubbornness. You know, curiosity is probably an obvious one, but I think stubbornness is is a really key one. Really talented social intelligence professionals are not gonna be satisfied with the first answer they see. And the first answer they see is probably not wrong. It’s probably right, but it also may not be the most interesting answer that lurks out there in the data. And so I think someone who really stands out in the field is willing and excited to keep digging and investigating and cutting the data different ways and to keep reading the conversations until new ideas occur to them and just to continue experimenting to find the unexpected stuff that lurks beneath the initial observations. And I think that’s where you get to show a well rounded cross functional client team that you’ve looked at the data from many angles, and you understand the dynamics within it, and you’ve seen the nooks and crannies. And all of those nooks and crannies are gonna be valuable to different people for different reasons on a cross functional client team.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So so taking that skill set and going beyond the obvious, keeping digging, going beyond just findings, but to develop true insights, I mean, that is challenging, and it’s a learned skill. So can you share perhaps a time where you’ve needed to pivot or change direction in your project due to some unexpected findings in your dataset? So going beyond the obvious and and it changed the direction of your work?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I can. And I I think as a tip for people who are kicking off projects with new teams and new audiences, one thing that I often tell people is, hey, bear in mind that social intelligence is a blissfully forgiving method of doing research and finding insights. So take advantage of that. We go into every project with a list of questions and hypotheses that we think are the right things to chase down, but we all wanna be open to the fact that we could find things in the data that suggest maybe we missed important questions or maybe the questions we were asking are not the most valuable ones. So I think pivoting happens a lot in social intelligence, and I think it’s a benefit of social intelligence. Ideally, you’re gonna find something that you didn’t anticipate listening, and that may require you to pivot. One example of that from a number of years ago is a study that the MotiveQuest team did on the Lunchables brand. And the original objective of the study was to understand how moms were feeling about Lunchables. But when the team examined the data in the conversation about lunchables, they saw that moms weren’t actually generating the bulk of the discussions of the brand. It was millennials. This was, like, 10 or 13 years ago. So millennials at that time were sort of just entering adulthood and in real adult life. They they were the 1st generation to have been raised eating Lunchables, and they were moving out of the house and setting up their own households. And to them, Lunchables was a normal food, not a novel product for kids, and it was a way to reconnect with childhood at a time when life, you know, was simple, and you didn’t have to find an apartment, or you didn’t have to do your own laundry, and you didn’t have to cook your own meals. And so Lunchables had a soft spark a spot in the heart of millennials for multiple reasons and that resulted in a lot of love, a lot of conversation, and as it turned out a lot of consumption among a segment of the population that, you know, we hadn’t expected to see. So we could have ended up plowing down the path that we originally started down and doing the study we set out to do about how moms feel about lunchables, but we and the client, of course, jointly ended up deciding let’s do a study on how and why Lunchables are still relevant to millennials, and what does that look like? And that ended up eventually leading to some really big new product introductions that were inspired by those findings. So I think the lesson there is sometimes you don’t know the most valuable questions to be asking until you see the data, and ideally, you treat pivoting as a privilege and in a positive versus a necessity or a negative.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you’ve got this wealth of experience working, you know, in the industry through all these changes, both from working across different types of organizations, to seeing this maturity of the social listening tools and technology happening. I mean, a lot has happened. How do you continue to stay motivated and inspired in this field?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. I am probably just lucky. I love the work. When I when I first started in this field back in 2,006, I I honestly went into it thinking, I’ll take this job for a year, and then I’ll go do whatever it was I had planned on doing career wise. Of course, I, you know, I ended up never leaving because it’s it’s always fun and it’s always something new. I love listening to people talk about the crazy, interesting, sometimes heartbreaking, unexpected things that happen in their lives. That’s almost not work for me. So I’m I’m usually lurking on Reddit way more than I should be in my free time and, know, I just enjoy hearing what people are doing and thinking.

Kirsten Recknagel:
And I think that’s pretty core to a lot of what happens within social intelligence is using this as a conduit into people’s daily lives. I do think that finding the right context or subject matter is important. So if you’re a person who’s not personally interested in cars, focusing on automotive social intelligence is probably not gonna be an awesome experience. I personally do not really like social media. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etcetera, myself as a personal user. So I wouldn’t be happy focusing on the social metrics side of social intelligence. But I do enjoy the consumer insights, and I love all things medical, so I’ve kind of been able to carve out the perfect place for myself within this this larger realm. I think the bottom line is social intelligence covers a lot of ground, and you can stay within social intelligence and still find a niche. And you’ll be happiest if you pursue those niches and areas that you have a personal passion for.

Working with diverse teams aids insight discovery

Jackie Cuyvers:
And so you’ve got this personal passion in health, and and you’re working with health and pharma and biopharma clients. And you mentioned that you work with, people who are kind of cross functional in different departments. How do you manage that cross functional collaboration where they have different experiences, different objectives? I mean, and and come from perhaps different perspectives on, you know, the the potential impact for this. So how do you manage that?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. My experience with cross functional teams is that it’s much easier to find audiences that can find your insights useful because there’s such a breadth of people who have different mandates within the organization, different things they’re working on, different areas of interest, and you as an insights professional have access to this wide range of ongoing conversations that you’re learning from. So the chances of you being able to match make with a large cross functional team between insights that you’ve identified and someone in the organizations who’s who’s gonna find those insights valuable is actually higher the more people from more organizational areas you can get on the in the room. Having said that, everybody comes we all come with our own baggage and preconceived notions about what social is and does, and that can cause problems, I think. When you have a an unwieldy broad client team that you’re talking with and everybody has their own notions of what social is and does and should be used for, personally, I think I’ve come to tend to downplay the sourcing of the data, downplay the fact that it is, quote, unquote, social data, and really emphasize the fact that it is consumer data or customer data. It’s the voice of the people that you want to learn more about for the stake of your business and your business decisions. And so in my experience with a broader team where people may have some baggage and some preconceived notions about social that are maybe a little bit listening. They may be better off just focusing on the voice of the consumer and the customer versus, this quote unquote social media angle.

Jackie Cuyvers:
That reframing of it from social data or social media conversations to consumer voice dataset, I think, is is really powerful. But you’re communicating with so many different team members. Do you find you need to kind of share the output in different ways? So are you communicating the data in charts or the presentation in a different way for these different stakeholders? How do you most effectively communicate the insights?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Now I will say one thing. Visuals are important in an area of work in which you’re dealing with very large volume of unstructured data. I I know it’s been said a 1000000 times before, but a picture is worth a 1000 words and makes whatever it is you’re trying to convey a lot more memorable if you can put some sort of visual behind it. I think that’s, a fairly universal way of better communicating with client teams no matter what role individuals on those teams may come from. Unfortunately, for me, I’m horrible at data visualisation, so I need a lot of help there. And and there are some great organisations that that you can relatively easily carve out some budget for if you don’t have a design team of your own. But even even small visual tips and tricks can help you convey a highly qualitative insight or point you wanna make, having read thousands of conversations more memorably. So I think that’s that’s one thing I would say is that this is one area where I think it’s worth investing. I’ll put in a plug for a company called 24 Slides, which is a lovely group of people that does really lovely and very quick work to to take analysis that you may have done in rough form and to to make it more visually intuitive, which is, as I said, something I am I have I have no luck doing myself. So I think that’s that’s probably the biggest thing. The second thing that we’ve started to do more often is to do roundups of data. So rather than having to stuff all of the things you’ve seen into a cohesive story, you might compliment that by saying, hey. Before we start, we want to hit you with a top 5 list or a top 10 list of interesting things we saw emerging in the data. Those things don’t have to be related to each other. They don’t have to link to each other. You don’t have to shoehorn them into a larger narrative.

Kirsten Recknagel:
But what we found is that in doing that top 10 or top 5 hit list, that very often resonates with very different people within a cross functional team. People will react to number 5, and then that person on the other side of the room will react to number 3, and they’ll find all of these individual points valuable and useful. And it’s an easier way, I think, to communicate what you’re seeing.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you’ve talked a little bit about how long you’ve been working in this field and how the tools have changed and how the platforms where data is coming from have changed. I mean, how do you continue to stay current with the latest developments in social intelligence, and what resources do you rely on?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Alright. So I have to admit that I don’t spend a lot of time keeping up on developments in social media per se. That is down to the fact that well, two facts. 1, that I’ve chosen a flavour of social intelligence to focus on, which is much more focused on basic foundational consumer insights and less focused on social media usage and metrics and analytics. So that and it’s it’s also due to the fact that I am personally not a particular fan of of social media from a from a user perspective. But having said that, I spend a lot of time just reading people’s online conversations that have nothing to do with anything I may be working on from a professional perspective. I love to understand what subreddits are becoming popular and what kind of content is being found there and and what’s trending and getting the most interaction on different platforms, what conversations are trending among gastroenterologists these days, or how about cardiologists or, you know, endocrinologists. I just like to take a scatter shot approach to always having my eyes out there reading and understanding what’s going on in the discussions that people are having right now. I think to me, the most valuable thing is to have a feel for the zeitgeist of a particular group of people online. And, yeah, it’s always surprising to me how often that random knowledge about recent conversations, about specific groups of people comes in handy. The the anecdotes and the be able the the ability to be able to share with clients a story or a parallel from an industry that is not their own is is actually, I think, very, very useful. So in terms of staying current on the latest developments in social intelligence, I probably give myself a B minus, but I think staying current on what is going on out there in the world of online conversations among different groups of people who may be interesting, that’s where I’ve chosen to focus.

Jackie Cuyvers:
And you’ve mentioned the the tools and platforms changing, and obviously, we’ve seen a lot of changes with Twitter to x and new platforms emerging. How do you see the field of social listening, insights, and intelligence evolving over the next 5 to 10 years?

Kirsten Recknagel:
5 to 10 years is a long time, so I’ll probably cheat and and focus a little bit a little bit closer in. But, you know, I think, one, we’ll we’ll continue to see splintering of social platforms that don’t play particularly nicely with attempts to harvest data and analyse it quantitatively. That’s, you know, that’s become more and more of an issue as platforms become large, but it’s very hard to get your hands around everything that’s going on there and submit it to analysis and investigation. I I suspect that that will continue. I think AI is obviously gonna change things up, ideally making some of our, you know, tedious tasks easier and easier, like coding terms or identifying themes that you might want to code or summarizing conversations so that you have a sense of what’s going on without having to spend so much time figuring that out manually yourself. I don’t know where AI’s role in this will end. I do know that right now, at least, AI can do some amazing shocking things, but still doesn’t reliably identify surprises and insights in the social data like a human can. The context and the culture and the human instinct is still really, really important. I also think that data curation will be more important. You know, we’ve curated a database of medical professionals, but you might need a database of veterinarians or dentists or consumers who fit a very specific profile. And being able to or or being willing to create a database of conversations authored by very specific types of people, I think, will be important and valuable. It’s the ability to to sort of segment a consumer conversation. It becomes more more expected, I think, and and results in more value.

How books can encourage empathy, listening and social insights

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you came to this, the social listening and insights role, you said, in in 2,006, and we’re new kind of to this area. Have you found any books or other resources along the way that you found to be particularly valuable or that you’d recommend now to other social listening and insights professionals?

Kirsten Recknagel:
So I don’t typically read business books. I can I can literally only remember 2 books I read? 1 of them was in business school. But one of them is that turns out is very relevant, I think, to social intelligence and to identifying insights from analyzing people’s online conversations. It’s funny that it’s relevant because it is a book that was written before I was born in the mid seventies, I believe. It was written at a time when no one had a computer at home and, you know, very few people had a computer at work. The author is Studs Terkel and the book is called Working. And in this book, Terkel interviews hundreds of people, just everyday normal people about their everyday social boring jobs. And then what he does is the magic where he shares their stories and the meaningful insights and patterns that he found across them in his book. And he does that with empathy and he makes you interested in people that you have nothing in common with and have, by all accounts, a very boring mundane life and work life in particular. I feel like that’s the perfect book, like, to put on a pedestal for social intelligence and social insights because it it really sums up the value of listening versus asking. And you just listen to people’s everyday stories about their everyday lives and you really pay attention to those stories and you believe that what those people say can be important and can be useful and can be interesting. You know, in this book, Studs Terkel pulls it all together and he’s very sensitive and very empathetic. And I think that’s that’s what we should all aspire to. So I recommend the book. You know, at this point, it’s probably $10 on Amazon. It’s a lovely read on its own, but it’s also a great reminder that, you know, if you’re not really interested in the people whose conversations you’re analysing, you should probably be in another line of work because if you can muster up the interest and the empathy and the sensitivity, you can bring to life just about anything and make it really compelling and and really magical and and very impactful.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you’ve mentioned empathy and sensitivity as as key qualities or skills. Are there any others that you think are essential for success in this field?

Kirsten Recknagel:
Yeah. Be curious, Be stubborn. Don’t accept that the first answer you see is the most valuable answer. I I think also stand up for yourself within an organization whether that’s client side or whether that’s agency professional services side. You know, everybody is asked to move faster and faster and faster in in all aspects of what we do these days. And, you know, I think the ugly truth is that you can get to good stuff fast, but you can get to better stuff if you give yourself the time to really put some thought and a little bit more effort into it. So if you can advocate for more time to keep poking around and digging and analysing and cutting the data in different ways and reading people’s discussions, It it feels like a bit of a luxury, but I think the end output is is more valuable and and more satisfying. And then, of course, I think, you know, it’s important to be honest with yourself. Do do you care about what people are saying and what you’re hearing? You know, if you don’t care, it’s hard to fake it. You’re probably gonna struggle to produce really insightful output that gets people excited.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So knowing what you do now, how would you advise future women in insights and pursuing their educational path or future career opportunities in this field?

Kirsten Recknagel:
This isn’t gender specific, but I do hope that social intelligence as a concept continues to be more integrated into consumer insights and market research methods, you know, methods for understanding, like, human behaviour. I I I still feel that social intelligence and social listening is too often seen as an isolated social media thing or silo, and I I think there’s a lot of social media pigeonhole calling that’s still happening within organizations. And from a career perspective, I think you’ll greatly broaden your career opportunities and your relevance across the organization if you emphasize social’s role in driving consumer insights versus positioning yourself purely as a social media expert. There’s value in being a social media expert, but there is also a danger in falling into that that sort of narrow definitional trap of what social media is and does and what role a social media expert should play within the organization. Social media is the way people live a lot of their lives and a huge window into people’s lives and behaviours and decisions. And for someone who spends their days steeped in how people are using social media, I think it’s a miss to be known as or to cultivate a reputation as a social media expert. I think you become much more than that. You’re a consumer expert. You’re a consumer insights expert. You’re a consumer behaviour expert. And I would love to see people really push to get social media more integrated into the other functions within the organization in that way.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Thanks, Kirsten, for joining us today. I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and experience with us.

Kirsten Recknagel:
Oh, it was my pleasure. It was a fun fun conversation. Thank you.

Jackie Cuyvers:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation and taken away some valuable insights and advice from today’s guest. If you like this episode, please be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Spotify so you never miss an episode. And don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn for updates and additional resources. I’d like to take a minute to once again thank our interviewee for taking the time to join us on the show today and sharing her story and insights with us. Your contribution to the world of social intelligence is truly invaluable, and we’re so grateful for you sharing your time and expertise. And finally, if you listening know of anyone else who would make a great guest on our show, please don’t hesitate to introduce us. We’re always on the lookout for new and inspiring stories. Until next time, I’m Jackie Cuyvers, and this is the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. Thanks so much for listening.