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[Podcast] Strategic Listening at Scale: Liz Gross on Higher Ed’s Social Insights Opportunity

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

Jackie Cuyvers meets Dr Liz Gross, founder and CEO of Campus Sonar

Host Jackie Cuyvers is joined by Dr Liz Gross, founder and CEO of Campus Sonar. Liz shares her journey from campus marketing to pioneering social listening in higher education, with a mission to rebuild public trust and foster authentic relationships. She explains how her team turns real-time insights into strategic impact across enrolment, alumni engagement and crisis comms, and why the human element remains essential in an AI-driven world. Packed with advice and forward-looking trends, this episode offers a valuable perspective on the future of social intelligence in higher ed.

Time Stamped Overview of the Podcast

00:00 – Higher Ed Social Listening Journey

05:41 – Building Culture in a Remote Team

10:11 – Pioneering Social Listening in Education

13:44 – Latino Focus in Higher Ed Listening

15:59 – Deep Discovery for Tailored Projects

18:55 – Alumni Engagement and Data Strategies

22:05 – Crisis Management in Higher Education

25:40 – “Reddit’s ‘Chance Me’ College Trend”

29:37 – Higher Education Social Intelligence Trends

33:56 – “Following Fascinations: A Career Journey”


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 Kivers 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’ve 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.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Let’s kick things off. Could you introduce yourself, your name, title and a brief overview about your business?

Liz Gross:
Sure. My name is Dr. Liz Gross and I am the founder and CEO of Campus Sonar. And our vision at Campus Sonar is for higher education to rebuild the public’s trust. And, and I believe for that to happen, institutions and the people within them need to build authentic relationships. So we partner with higher ed focused leaders to guide research led transformation. And we do that by empowering them with social intelligence insights to develop audience centric strategies aligned with the goals of the institutions they serve. And yes, I have repeated that many, many times to make sure we always stay on mission.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Excellent. It sounds like your journey from starting from campus marketing roles to founding Campus Sonar has been quite the journey. What’s motivated you to focus on social listening as a strategic tool for this higher education space?

Liz Gross:
Yeah, so I have always worked in higher education. When I was in college, I realized that could be a job and it became my career and I started working on campuses in the mid 2000s and that’s really when I started to dip my toes into social listening. I really realized specifically the potential power of connection and insight from Twitter. When I was working at a university in about 2005, 2006, and back then I was doing social listening via like RSS feeds and Google Reader RIP Google Reader. But 10 years later, so we’re getting into like mid 2010s. I stayed in higher ed, but I took what I call a higher ed adjacent role at a student loan servicer. And there instead of like Google Reader, paperclips and duct tape, I had access to enterprise level social listening tools just as they were really rapidly evolving and merging. And I think in five years I probably had four or five different primary tools.

Liz Gross:
But by 2016, I could really see how I would apply social listening cross functional, functionally, if I was back on campus. So I did what I think a lot of folks in higher ed do is I went to a conference. I presented all my ideas to higher ed marketers and tried to give them all away. But two things happened at that conference that really launched me into doing this as a business and a career. The first was that the keynote was by Richard Edelman, and he gave a speech entitled the Rise of the Fifth Estate, which is still available online. I can find it. It was a call for higher ed to build authentic engagement with soc, dedicate resources to engaging in community and policy work. And that really resonated with me.

Liz Gross:
And I saw how social listening could fit into that call to action. And then my presentation at that conference, it was standing room only, and there was a line of people waiting to speak to me after, which was great. But they all said the same thing. They were excited. They said we must absolutely leverage social listening in all areas. We got to work on reputation and alumni engagement and fundraising and enrollment growth and market research. But then they’d pause and they would give me a list of reasons why they wouldn’t be able to do that on their campus. And it might have been time or talent or tools or what have you.

Liz Gross:
So those. Those two things in that background combined, I decided to build a team that could partner with colleges and universities so they would be able to do it.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Incredible. You’ve emphasized when you first joined us, the importance of rebuilding public trust in higher. How does social listening contribute to this goal?

Liz Gross:
So I think that one of the reasons that public trust and higher ed has been decreasing is that we lost track of the needs and voices of students, but also policymakers. And, you know, there’s generational differences and expectations from students, but the demographics of students have changed drastically in the last few decades. And that’s a lot of different viewpoints and needs to understand. And I think social listening not only gathers insight at scale, but it elevates the stories of people and their experiences. And those voices gathered from the masses at scale need to be heard for higher ed to rebuild public trust. So I think social listening is a key ingredient.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So it sounds like a lot of different viewpoints and things to take into account in the listening aspect, but in the kind of people doing the listening. Leading your team at Campus Sonar, how do you foster collaboration and maintain a strong organizational culture?

Liz Gross:
Yeah, we’ve had to work on this from the beginning because even prior to the pandemic we started going to a partially remote team and since 2020 we have been fully remote and right now we’ve got people from coast to coast in the US and in terms of our collaboration and org culture, first of all, I have to give full credit to my leadership team in this area because the they really do make sure that my vision is actioned, if you will, into processes and procedures and just ways of working that foster that culture. So years ago we committed to distinct cultural pillars as a team. It’s a living Google Doc and we refer to them when making business decisions and they’re documented for everybody to see. So that’s kind of the core. But we also leverage technology to maximize both synchronous and asynchronous work. As a fully remote team, that async part is really important to us. We’ve really found a lot of innovation and speed to insight when we take an all hands approach to work as appropriate. Right now we’re still a fairly small team.

Liz Gross:
There’s nine of us. If the project is large enough or has a fast enough timeline, sometimes all of us will have a part to play in that single project. And that gives every single sonarian, which is what we call ourselves, the chance to work with everybody else. And then as a CEO, I am very committed to communication and transparency. So I have a CEO, Corner Channel and Slack. We also have open revenue updates so they always know what I’m thinking, how the business is doing, what I’m seeing in the industry, and then bringing us together regularly. So we have regular, regular virtual gatherings at the team and company level to make sure we’re all at the same page. And then twice a year, either in person or in a dedicated virtual space, we hold what we call a Sonarian summit where we can talk about big picture ideas and also set aside time to get to know each other better.

Liz Gross:
We’re big nerds, so we like to do some team building that is also analytical. There is a decades old game called Crack the Case that will always bring scenarios around to try and think in new and unique ways. So we leverage a combination of those to make sure that humans remain the center of our business and that the humans who work for us and with us really truly know each other.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Well, it sounds like you’ve built a great community and team there. Can you share an example of how your team have developed insights that have perhaps directly influenced a university’s strategic decision making?

Liz Gross:
Yeah, one I think I’d share is from a Recent client, North Carolina State University, NC State came to us looking to improve their lead generation and conversion of students in under enrolled colleges and programs. You know, they had some programs with a wait list and others that they had space. So we wanted to help them fill that, that open space. So what we did is we measured brand awareness and perceptions. We looked at conversation about each of those colleges based on their custom needs to identify enrollment opportunity. We looked at barriers for transfer students and also ways to grow belonging through student involvement and mental health. And then this was over the course of over a year. So we were doing this on an ongoing basis and we had the chance to work directly with each of the college’s marketing teams.

Liz Gross:
And those insights were translated to action by improving information sharing between siloed college enrollment teams to make sure they all got the best of the information available to them. Very strategically and tactically, they shifted their enrollment marketing messaging, like what they would say in emails and when to maximize unique aspects of each college. And then our team also worked to coach the marketing communications staff so that they could increase the efficiency and their effectiveness of their work just based on some best practices and expertise of our team. So by bringing them together, sentence centering the audience perceptions and then upskilling them a little bit, they were seeing great results. It worked and they’re absolutely moving in the right direction to hit their goals now.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Well, that’s a great case study of strategic impact. Having that type of impact is great and that you can share these examples, but I imagine you still get questions and challenges from other universities. So what types of challenges have you encountered in convincing institutions and these universities to adopt social listening and how do you address them?

Liz Gross:
Yeah, so it’s been eight years of this. And when Campus Sonar launched in 2017, social listening as a strategic input to organizations was brand new to 99% of higher education. It wasn’t something that service providers were offering, it wasn’t something that was being done well in house. So it really felt like we were creating a category within our industry. And I think one of the challenges that was persistent was that there was a fairly prevalent belief among senior leadership that there was not strategic value to social media. A couple of years ago, I had a bunch of recently retired presidents on a zoom call where I talked to them about the role of social intelligence in strategic planning for universities. And I’ll never forget this president, recently retired, said, it’s interesting that you call it social intelligence because nothing I have ever been presented with from my team from social media has ever been remotely Intelligent and that that hurts, but also that was their opinion. So it’s either that or that social listening was somehow less than traditional research methodologies rather than a strategic choice or a compliment.

Liz Gross:
So we’ve really moved the needle towards acceptance and really leveraging social intelligence strategically in three ways. One was just relentless storytelling. Since we started Campus Sonar eight years ago, I’ve spoken at over 100 conferences. The team and I have authored several hundred blog posts and newsletters. We’ve written two books and we’ve written for industry publications, participated in interviews like this one. We’ve been cited in mass marketed books. So as we see success with our partners, we will tell that story as much as we can, centering that campus partner’s voice whenever possible and also looking ahead to what could we be doing next if institutions buy into this methodology. The second thing that was really important was moving into the C suite and the boardroom as our primary client.

Liz Gross:
I think not unlike other industries in higher ed, social listening was seen as just a marketing thing for a really long time. A few years ago, we at Campus Sonar made a concerted effort to listen to and then speak with presidents, members of their leadership team and trustees. And this was a real game changer and allows us to do work that not only has strategic support, is aligned with the strategic plan, but is coming from the top and is serving the top so they see the value. And then third, I think it’s really important that we started to work alongside traditional management or strategy consultants where they introduce social listening as an opportunity to enhance a project. And then with their clients desires, they bring us in to provide that service. And that sort of co branding, if you will, or certification from someone else’s expertise has really, really helped to jump leaps and bounds forward with our market.

Jackie Cuyvers:
With your team based coast to coast in the US and your clients or the higher industry starting to understand the strategic impact that social listening can bring. I know you have, you know, potentially a lot of different US universities to work with. Have you considered undertaking projects that involve kind of cross cultural or international social listening?

Liz Gross:
Yeah. So while we do focus on the US the area that we’re best suited to do cross cultural social listening in currently is with the Latino population. And frankly that is because we have several Latinos and Latinos on staff who can conceptualize and execute and interpret that work. Well, we specifically in higher ed, this is valuable because the Hispanic market in the US is the largest growing demographic and it’s becoming the largest demographic on some campuses. So when we work with universities that are designated as Hispanic serving institutions, which we call them HSI or emerging hsis will determine what aspects of the Spanish language would help them meet their needs. And we saw a really early win with this a few years ago when we were working with the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, and we’ve still been working with them for about three years. They’re an emerging HSI and they really wanted to put effort into cultivating and engaging with the Hispanic community in their area. So they started to offer Spanish speaking admissions events for prospective and admitted students.

Liz Gross:
And initially they were assessing those events just as they would assess any admissions event by attendance and an on site written survey. And they weren’t really feeling great about how they were doing. But via social listening with us, they learned that there was actually a rich Spanish language social conversation about and around those events that painted a really different picture of the engagement and the impact then the traditional assessment did. So not only did it change their perception of the event, but they worked to infuse social media into the event so that they could spawn or foster online conversation to get an even broader perspective of community impact and engagement. So now they see more Spanish conversation about their university on social media. And we know that word of mouth and community influence is incredibly important to that community’s decision making process. So for us at Campus Zone, our Spanish language within the US has been that first step into true like cross cultural social listening.

Jackie Cuyvers:
How do you ensure that the insights provided are contextually relevant across these diverse campus environments and audiences?

Liz Gross:
Yeah, so we do fairly deep discovery with nearly every project we’re doing, whether it’s a short term project or a long term partnership. And we want to make sure we understand what’s the student body, what’s the community makeup, what has happened historically that we need to be aware of. And we try not to make assumptions from one institution to another without teasing those out with the clients. I’ve particularly noticed that within the US We’ve had multiple clients in Utah, and Utah is a different environment than many states in the United States because they’re about 50% Mormon and that’s a different demographic than any state in the US and whether you’re working with a Mormon institution or a public institution in Utah, you have to understand what that means to the culture and the role of the church and all those sorts of things. So in that instance, you know, we do not have someone of the Mormon faith on our staff. So we have to do the work to understand the background and the context so that we don’t show up as tone deaf or applying insights in the wrong context. And so that’s. I could go on about this for hours and hours, but we’ll just leave that one there.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So every industry has its specific challenges and applications thinking about higher education. Specifically in what ways does social listening intersect with areas like enrollment management, alumni relations and crisis communications in higher ed?

Liz Gross:
So enrollment management, one of the really interesting applications of social listening is truly understanding student decision making process and evolving perceptions over time. And I say that because our data shows that over the last 10 years or so, the volume of conversation from prospective students about the college admissions process has increased more than 10 times over that 10 year period. And specifically it has exploded on Reddit. Whether it’s in the applying to college subreddit or other career vocation specific subreddits, students are regularly going to this online forum of strangers to decide where they should apply, if they’ll be a good fit, what they should be looking for in a college, and it is a key influencer in their decision making. Now we also see TikTok and Instagram playing a role in that as well. And that for the longest time was a very black box to institutions. If it wasn’t happening on their owned accounts in these spaces, they weren’t seeing it. So we’re helping them understand broadly trends in students desire and perception, but also specific to their institution, what the audience defined differentiators are so that they can lean into those in enrollment marketing or address them if they are not a positive differentiator.

Liz Gross:
So that’s largely the application to enrollment management. Alumni relations is very much either an audience understanding or a stakeholder engagement application. So if we look at the highest level, institutions have a fairly hard time getting regular data from their alumni via surveys or other tools. And that’s challenging because if you think about yourself, if you’re an alumnus, who you are today is very different than who you are when you graduated. So the alumni association or engagement office wants to know who you are today so that they can better connect with you, continue to help you understand the value of the university so that you will refer other prospective students, and ideally so that they would love it if you would donate of your time or your treasure. So at a macro level we can understand how alumni as a group are talking about an institution, how they see their connections, and then we can help identify Personas or content strategies that would best connect with where this group of online alumni are at now. And then from a very one to one stakeholder engagement perspective, we’ve been able to help Folks develop very strategic and contextualize engagement strategies for individuals whose relationships they want to cultivate with based on the connections that we’re seeing in social and online spaces. And then crisis communication is not unlike many other industries.

Liz Gross:
However, we will often see crises last a very long time in higher education. So we not only help our clients identify when something might be happening, but we really help them understand the, the breadth and depth of what is being said in the general public about that issue. So when we’re working with a client, we’re building a custom segment of what that issue related conversation is so that they can understand what are the prevailing sentiments, who’s influencing that conversation. Are there any misperceptions to inform their crisis communication if needed? Sometimes it helps them decide not to respond to something publicly that they believe is a crisis, but actually doesn’t deserve a response. And then in an ongoing crisis, we can show to the senior most decision makers, the board, the trustees, how much mind share or share of voice that crisis still has. Three, four, five months later. Because it’s often that the governing board will feel a sense of deep pain or ongoing hurt about a crisis and they may be afraid to move forward in really positive ways when they don’t know that they have the space to do so. But social listening data can help them make that determination based on how much of that conversation is still happening.

Jackie Cuyvers:
That crisis situation use case sounds like it could be something that’s not just kind of valuable, but needed for many institutions. Are there any specific scenarios where social listening has helped a university navigate a crisis or sensitive situation like you’ve mentioned?

Liz Gross:
There are many and we’re doing one right now that I can’t quite talk about. But I like to think that in this area, some of our best case studies are invisible. And I think about early, early on in campus sonar, we were working with a small private college and there was a determination from a federal governing body that one of their senior officials had done something very bad. They had misappropriated funds that were intended for student veterans and they were very, very concerned about the public impact of this. Of course, their first, their first action was to ensure that the behavior had stopped and that they were protecting the students who deserved these funds. But they were getting ready to make a series of public statements and talk about what’s next, when really it was also a viable choice that they could just communicate one to one with anybody who might have been affected. So they came to us asking for advice and we took a look at what was happening online and at first glance, it looked like there was a pretty large spike in conversation about this issue. And upon further investigation, we could see that it was really only two or three individuals who really had something to say about this issue.

Liz Gross:
And then there were a couple of coordinated groups of bots that were pushing this issue amongst themselves, but not into the general public. And ultimately the institution decided not to make a statement right away and do the private communication as they needed and then wait until the situation had been fully dealt with and wrapped up, and then they could inform the community of everything that had been done and what happened at that point. And for them, that avoided them becoming a local news story and a point of potential, a flashpoint that could have gotten national at that point because they realized that their local community was not actually clamoring for something there and they could just communicate directly with those who were affected.

Jackie Cuyvers:
That must have given them such confidence and peace of mind, especially with, like, you know, the actual data standing behind it.

Liz Gross:
Yes. Yeah, it was a feeling that they hadn’t had before, so.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So you mentioned that a lot of the students, especially or prospective students, are speaking on Reddit or are communicating and short form video, like on TikTok and Instagram, all of those, you know, different platforms have their own language and vocabulary. How do you address the challenge of interpreting social media data that includes not just kind of the language of the platforms or the medium used, but things like sarcasm, slang, or rapidly evolving student language?

Liz Gross:
This is one of the reasons that I firmly believe humans always have a role in social listening. When you mentioned rapidly evolving student language, that is a huge area of context that we need to bring to conversation about higher education then. Sarcasm and slang, of course, are prevalent in any sort of social listening research project. But we have developed processes to speed up our validation and ensure that we’re not spending too much time, you know, checking boxes here or there. But we always have humans involved in the data to identify these sorts of things. We’ll never fully trust an algorithmic sentiment analysis at its face. We always want to get in and see what we’re looking at. And then sometimes we need to understand this evolving language so that we can teach it to our clients.

Liz Gross:
There’s a really good example of this student enrollment conversation on Reddit. They have a few phrases that these students use amongst themselves that are really driving behavior. And one of them is chance me. Students will go on and they’ll say, chance me, and then they’ll share all of their academic and extracurricular profile and they will ask their peers who are of course, not trained admissions officers to identify their chances of getting admitted into various types of institutions. And this is so common, and it not only is completely unseen by most institutions, but it really is representative of a mindset and a behavior that students think there’s a magic checklist somewhere that is going to determine their college future, which is not the case. And this has strategic implications for how a university, through its admissions counselors or its relationships with guidance counselors or its work in the community, wants to communicate what admission means and how that decision is made. And also center the reality that for most institutions in the United States, most people who are accepted, most people who apply are accepted. So that evolving student language is not only important for us to analyze the data, but to help our clients make sense of it and apply it strategically.

Liz Gross:
So it’s humans and thankful that the humans that work with us are also willing to participate in some of these platforms so that they are immersed in that space and that language so that they can also bring that to work with them.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So that human aspect, I 100% agree, is super important. But we are seeing the rise of AI and machine learning. Do you see any opportunity for these technologies to enhance or transform social listening in higher ed?

Liz Gross:
I see opportunity, but so far I’m not impressed with what is actually out there. So in terms of opportunity, I really want to be able to teach a technology tool, our secret sauce, if I can trust that it’ll stay private of how we segment various aspects of, of higher education conversations. Like we need to be able to look at a massive data set and know this is about athletics, this is non athletic, this is about admissions, this is from alumni. And we do all of that and we’ve got human driven procedures to do that. I would love, love AI to do it. So far, everything we’ve tested has not worked in that way. So I, I think true transformation from AI or machine learning beyond what we’re already doing, which is identifying a spike in a change in conversation and what drove that and those sorts of things. I personally think for our purposes, we’re a long way from seeing that as a transformation of the work that we’re doing.

Liz Gross:
AI does not understand the strategic context of institutions. It doesn’t understand the difference between various institutions. In Utah, for example, the, the example I was giving earlier, and it’s hallucinating far too much for me right now. So if we were to set up a cage match of social intelligence professionals, of pro AI versus AI skeptics, I’m still on the skeptic side, I see lots of opportunity, but I’ve yet to see strong signals that it’s moving in the way I hope it would. I, for example, don’t want AI summarizing data into a report that goes to a client right now. We want to make sure that we’re looking at that and making sense of it. So to be determined would be the TLDR of that answer for me.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Okay, fair enough. So, looking ahead, what trends do you anticipate will shape the future of social intelligence in this academic sector?

Liz Gross:
So I think about two macro trends and then one very specific to social intelligence. So there is a lot of pressure put in higher ed institutions, and I think they need faster feedback loops as that pressure is increasing, and faster feedback loops are not going to happen with more surveys or more focus groups. And I see social intelligence as a huge opportunity for higher education there. And also because of the funding and fiscal environment of higher ed in the US where federal funding is becoming less and less certain, sometimes state funding is decreasing, I believe there’ll be a focus on fundraising, both from alumni and other philanthropists as a financial backstop. And that means it’s really important to engage with young alumni and ensure that they’re more likely to give so you can increase the number of donors within that donor pyramid, if you will. So really, understanding the baseline and midline of a traditional donor pyramid is going to be really important to the future of social intelligence in higher ed, and then just for social intelligence itself and the role that higher ed can play. I hope as institutions of higher education continue to evolve to meet workforce needs, that we’ll start to see some real robust social intelligence training pathways. There are not a lot of those now.

Liz Gross:
You might get a class or two at some institutions and there’s less than a dozen social intelligence labs at universities in the US So I hope that higher ed will be a part of the future of social intelligence by stepping up to as a solid training provider in an industry that desperately needs more grounded training and career pathways.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Yeah, we’re definitely seeing more pop up, but as you say, there’s certainly room for more. So you’ve authored guides like the Higher Ed Social Listening Handbook. What other resources or guides would you recommend even, you know, beyond those university courses or what you’ve published for professionals seeking to deepen their understanding of social listening and insights?

Liz Gross:
So Shameless Plug, campus owners newsletter and website and blog is always going to have some higher education applied aspects of social listening. And I really think in that industry right now, we are the Best source. But we really try to also talk about what is a strategic insight to action look like and I think that’s applicable to everybody. Also of course want to give a shout out to the social Intelligence lab as a community for people that want to deepen their understanding. And so social intelligence specifically I have been sending the 2025 state of social Listening report to a lot of people in the last month and I use it to help folks higher up in various organizations understand the role that social listening is playing in organizations cross sector. So I’m really just going to double down. If you’re outside of higher ed and the social intelligence lab, what advice would.

Jackie Cuyvers:
You give to women aspiring to leadership roles in the field of social intelligence and higher education?

Liz Gross:
The first thing I would say is that you’re poised to succeed. Because every social intelligence focused firm that I am regularly in touch with is women led. Our global community of social intelligence professionals is women led. There are a lot of kick butt women in this industry, so you’re already poised to succeed. But I would say to anybody, no matter their gender, focus on the application of social intelligence insights to business goals and outcomes. Figure out how you can leverage various frameworks or ways of thinking to make that application. Because where we’ll get stuck as individuals or as a profession is when we dive into our social media or social listening jargon and start talking. So we sound like that teacher in Charlie Brown to somebody who doesn’t understand the space.

Liz Gross:
So I’d really, really focus on that transfer of insight to action and strategic application within an organization.

Jackie Cuyvers:
So reflecting on your career, what educational experiences or paths would you suggest for those interested in pursuing a similar trajectory?

Liz Gross:
So you know, there’s not a direct path for most of us, but I often think back on how well prepared I was for this career that I didn’t know would exist. When I was in college, I happened to major in interpersonal communication and my minor was technology and New Media arts. And who would have thought that 20 some years later I would be focused on how people communicate with each other on the Internet. So that’s what fascinated me at the time. So first I would say work on what fascinates you and what you have an interest in. Particularly for social listening and social intelligence, it’s really important to understand people and language and systems, whether that’s organizational systems or cultural systems or community systems. So anything that gets you into those spaces is great. I’ve seen really great social intelligence professionals who have backgrounds in anthropology or backgrounds in education or backgrounds in truly anything as long as they’re willing to focus on those three things.

Liz Gross:
And then lastly, I think it’s really important in this profession to cultivate a mindset of flexibility in your work, because the way you do the work now is likely not going to be the way you do the work next year, or maybe even on your next project. The data sources are changing, the tools are changing, the application is changing, and you have to be very willing and excited about that fact and be flexible in the way you approach your work, both now, today, and probably forever.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Thanks so much, Liz for sharing your experience and expertise. It’s been a great chat.

Liz Gross:
Thanks Jackie.

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 listeners 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.

Jackie Cuyvers:
Until next time, I’m Jackie Cuyvers, and this is the Women in Social Listening and Insights podcast. Thanks so much for listening.