Social intelligence is market research that uses online conversation data to answer key business questions. The internet is an always on focus group that allows you to better understand markets, audiences, brands, or organizations. In higher ed, social intelligence can inform organizational strategy, enrollment, alumni engagement, advancement, academic planning, and reputation and brand strategy.
Social intelligence can also improve the value and relevance of environmental scanning when it’s used to understand audiences, markets, and brands, and inform strategies to elevate each area. Reputation management is one of the first use cases for social intelligence, and is still the largest. Recently, we’ve seen an increased interest in using it to impact employer branding.
I spoke with Eddie Francis on “I Wanna Work There” about how people, especially those from historically marginalized communities, look for places where they’ll feel safe and accepted when searching for employment. Prospective employees use review sites like Glassdoor and others like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit to see what it’s like for somebody like them to work at a particular institution. This proactive approach from prospective employees is becoming more common, but colleges and universities have very low awareness of how they’re perceived as an employer. In our experience working with over a hundred colleges and universities, we’ve never been asked about perception with prospective or current employees.
When we look at a year of conversation about any college or university, the staff or faculty as individuals are usually within the top 10 most frequent contributors, regardless of the type or size of institution. They talk about their day-to-day work, celebrate athletics, highlight community engagement opportunities, or promote themselves professionally. As the biggest and most valuable asset of a campus, there are multiple reasons it’s critical to know what they say about your campus and the environment.
A recent trend in faculty conversation supports what we've seen in general—feeling safe in your identity is extremely important to employees, especially for Gen Z who consider workplace safety a top concern. Seeing an online community that reflects a welcoming environment lets people know they’ll be safe if they work there. Workplace safety encompasses literal physical safety, but also psychological or interpersonal safety—meaning a safe environment for interpersonal risk taking where people feel comfortable sharing concerns and mistakes without fear of embarrassment or retribution.
Research proves that if you build stronger psychological safety in your organization it increases multiple measures of inclusion and has an outsized impact on retention for marginalized groups. For example, a member of the LGBTQ community is 6.2 times more likely to retain a job if they feel psychologically safe. This trend continues for populations of color, women, and people with disabilities, showing up in online conversation. Prospective employees investigate multiple sources and if they find something overly positive or negative, it fully impacts application and employment decisions.
Gen Z is also a part of the decline in the concept of workism, where work is the full identity of everything you are. When they research what an employer looks like online, they’re not searching an institution's culture page or going to their owned social media property, they’re searching the institution's name and nickname on Reddit, X, and Tiktok to see what others say about it. They see what you miss if you’re not invested in social intelligence.
Another consideration is how social intelligence insights impact the workforce from an employee and reputational risk perspective. Rebecca Rapp, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Ascendium Education Group, shared her perspective from her experience in risk management.
“Times have changed and social media presents new risks and opportunities—we just have to keep up,” Rebecca shared. “We can't use the same tools we've used year after year and century after century to navigate and manage risk in today's volatile environment.”
It’s important to understand how social media can exponentially amplify or even create risk. “I don't know that we can take any risk calculus or linear analysis and just know,” said Rebecca, “particularly if we're sitting with other risk managers who look and act like us and aren’t skeptical of the higher education value proposition.”
Rebecca advises risk managers to take advantage of the opportunities social media presents to glean all available wisdom to avoid or mitigate risk before an issue occurs.
The real-time feedback from social intelligence and the ability to pivot when you know what’s working and what isn’t, is critical for managing risk. During a crisis, social intelligence has the most utility when you have the full context of what’s going on. Spikes in mentions or social media uprisings are valuable within the context of the overall conversation and the goals of the campus, and jumping in in a last minute crisis to report out metrics, numbers, and sentiment can be helpful, but it's not nearly as helpful as when you have the full picture.
Ongoing social intelligence also helps recognize the offline implications and utilities. When we're brought in in a crisis, the issue is often viewed as a social media problem, not an actual problem. But there needs to be an understanding that those two things can be true at the same time.
Lastly, when you use social listening in a crisis within the context of ongoing social intelligence, you have the value of trends over time, so you can quickly answer how a particular situation is different from a normal day, week, or month in our brand or organization's conversation. When you use social intelligence on an ongoing basis, you have more valuable trends over time data and are able to more confidently look into the future and predict trends.
Rebecca shared critical ways risk managers can use social intelligence to enhance their efforts.
Overall, it's just much more strategically valuable when you have the ability to look back in any moment as well as the potential to look forward, instead of just jumping in and figuring out what you’re listening to.