To understand the skills an analyst needs to survive and flourish in 2019, a good starting point is to recognize the common challenges that face anyone responsible for drawing insights from data.
Throughout 2018 we ran a series of roundtable discussions at our NYK events in which we discussed topics from digital transformation to data integration. We’ve listened to analysts from a range of industries, identifying the common challenges they face and the skills required to overcome them heading into the new year.
This guide will explore those challenges, broken into four key areas and outlining the skills the most successful analysts of 2019 will need to succeed: interrogation, collaboration, creativity and delegation.
(1) Interrogation
Whether they’re working in-house or agency side, social analysts are responsible for providing insights to and responding to questions from clients and / or internal stakeholders.
Often, people within the wider organization don’t know the right questions to ask. How many times have you been asked to ‘show me the ROI’, or just ‘figure out the impact,’ or worst – ‘give me the biggest number’? These questions are usually due to lack of understanding and engagement with the various tools that can generate the insights they’re after. This can lead to people either asking for the impossible or the ultimately useless.
Finding the right question to ask is not a simple task and it’s an integral starting point to any analysis. Analysts must be able to interrogate a brief to distill exactly what is needed and what can realistically be delivered using the tools at their disposal. Ambiguity is not a starting point.
“It seems sensible to ask about topics that are big in conversations around your industry, but even nailing down what a topic is is difficult…When you’re getting started, the majority of the work (60%) is finding the right question. Then 40% is analysis.”
Of course, ongoing education around what is possible with social analysis will help matters. But what skills can you develop and take into 2019 to turn vague briefs into clear questions that are worthy of an analyst’s time?
- Set parameters in order to answer the question, depending on the platform, trend, or product in question. Free thinking is great but your end product needs to recommend actual actions that align with a clear objective.
- Putting together processes that answer predictable questions on a regular basis is a good way to avoid spending your time answering the obvious. Speeding up the way this kind of research is done means you can take a deeper dive into more complex questions.
- Truly interrogate the brief that you are given. Whatever organization you work in, insights teams need to have the same approach as an agency when they receive a brief from a client. What’s the question you really want to be answered? Clarify the questions you can and can’t answer to set expectations before you start.
“Good questions for Brandwatch and our customers to ask are questions that strike a balance between two factors – a question that addresses an issue close to the business and a question that has an actual, tangible answer – something that tests and experiments can validate.”
(2) Collaboration
Drowning in data, starving for information – the struggle is real for many businesses. Extracting and highlighting actionable insights from a wall of data takes expertise, but no analyst is an island. We can’t generate, distribute and action insights alone – we need to collaborate to make this happen.
“I think it’s really difficult to lift your head out of data and say ‘where’s the story?’ It’s training and it’s collaboration. I say collaboration because even after 30 years in the industry I can’t do it alone."
What tangible steps can you take in 2019 to help your organization become more collaborative and make those marginal gains towards a truly data-driven culture?
- Get the right platform – Find the tool that fits your analytics requirements and a platform that integrates multiple data sources that are commonly used across your organization. Consolidation is essential for successful collaboration. Linking your analysis to the customer experience and the impact on revenue will propel your insights beyond the marketing department.
- Get the right people – Fostering a collective mindset that shares the same goal and passion for insights that have an impact on the business is key. Finding the right people can be a challenge for hiring managers so it’s important to communicate with them about the purpose you’d like your new hire to fill and the level at which they’ll be working.
- Prove the value – If you’ve achieved the first two steps then you’re working for the right organization that has recognised the importance of investing in insights. Time to get that quick and early win! Focus on the immediate priority – it could be a competitor, a vertical, or a persona. Utilize the customer success team of your chosen service providers. They are an extension of your team with the ultimate goal of helping you reach your objectives.
- Build momentum – Find the right spot between the frequency of analysis, the amount of resource needed, and the people receiving your reports. Maximize real-time reporting dashboards that encourage self-serve insights to reduce pressure on resource and increase exposure.
- Align with key stakeholders – Find your internal champions and social intelligence advocates from other departments across the organization. This could originate from a shared use of a particular tool or platform. Raise your profile by amplifying the importance of social intelligence through training workshops – one success story you’ve contributed to in another team can do wonders for your team’s reputation around the organization.
(3) Creativity
Creativity in the presentation of our results is key to successful collaboration. But how do you make your results engaging or interactive enough to ensure key people outside of your department are actually reading them and taking action?
Of course, there are common obstacles to overcome before we get to that point. Time is always a factor, especially within centralized insight departments that are continuously troubleshooting.
Traditionally analysts have spent more time in spreadsheets than thinking of creative ways to present the data, but those worlds are slowly merging. The popularity of stunning data visualizations online and in print are blending the role of the analyst with the role of the journalist or creative. To be analytical and to be creative are not mutually exclusive, but developing skills in both these areas takes practice.
“Non-analysts will become analytical very quickly; present the information in a way that makes sense to our human brains.”
Being able to tell a story with data that includes real emotion and verbatim examples can inform business strategy and inspire campaigns, from the shaping of the initial creative concept to execution and evaluation of success. It’s important to show the human core of the data you’re presenting. Social insights are really just human insights after all.
"It will be very important for teams to get creative with data and methodologies in an increasingly polarized landscape. Research is by definition a constantly evolving field and as such teams will need to adapt and ideally anticipate this ever changing context.”
Of course, creativity need not only come in at the point of presentation. As an analyst tackling difficult business questions, creativity in problem solving and using the tools you have at your disposal in innovative ways can only serve to create more interesting insights.
It’s always important, especially when working with social data, to keep an open mind and to seek the unexpected. As the biochemist Isaac Asimov said, “The most exciting phrase in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny’.”
The strength of social data is not in the ways that it reflects the assumptions we already have but in how it casts light on new and unexpected things. If we only look at the data through the lenses of what is plausible based on our previous assumptions, we’re not going to get anything out of it.
The same can be said of any data source an analyst is working with. Open mindedness and finding innovative ways of challenging assumptions and allowing valuable, unexpected insights to emerge is the mark of a great creative analyst.
Here are some steps you can take to increase creativity:
- Honed data visualization skills will enable you to present your insights in a way that can be interacted with and discussed by multiple departments.
- Tell a story with data that includes real emotion and verbatim examples from customer experiences that can inform business strategy and inspire campaigns.
- Attend ‘creative’ meetings, whether this is with design, product, or a campaign planning session. You’ll be amazed at the amount of added value your insight can provide. Plus, you’ll get insight into the questions that other teams are trying to answer.
- Monitor the engagement of your reporting and track how many times a report was viewed, what were the “hottest” pages of a report, and what reports were the most shared and engaged with. Feedback doesn’t come often, so this is a nice way to gauge where the interest is, what to do more of and what to do less of.
(4) Delegation
If we want to make positive strides in 2019 and action all of the above initiatives, we’ll need to delegate some of our day-to-day tasks. In essence, we need to ditch some of that “grunt work”.
We often talk about how AI will replace jobs in the future but how can we harness the power of artificial intelligence in a positive way? How can we allow AI to do the heavy lifting and free ourselves up to use our talents for more creative pursuits?
“In a typical week, your brand, products, campaigns and competitors will generate 20 major peaks. I’d say an analyst spends around 3 hours and 20 minutes conducting this analysis – in other words, a whole morning. Iris would take less than two seconds to conduct the same analysis.”
AI can help with the time consuming and heavy lifting tasks so we can get straight to the insight and focus on answering the more complex and interesting questions. Resource is one of the main challenges for today’s analysts but, as tools get smarter, the time spent gathering insights can now be reduced significantly.
An instant deep dive into historical data comparisons and competitor benchmarking will allow more time to feed the insights directly into the teams that can turn them into great business results.
AI can be a valuable ally to help validate your analysis, to sense check, and give you that crucial second opinion – something that will be very useful when we start to propel our insights outside of the marketing department and into C suite presentations and reports.
Here’s a summary of some key tasks you should delegate in 2019.
- Gathering insights – AI can do the heavy lifting for you, giving you the time to weave together the insights that really matter.
- Historical data comparison – Constant AI monitoring that will highlight anomalies compared to past performance.
- Competitor benchmarking – Set your platform up to compare performance against your competitors, giving you the insight you need to identify early opportunities.
So, we know we can delegate key tasks such as historical data comparison, validation, and speed to insights to AI, but without social intelligence specialists there will be no strategy. As Ben says, “it [AI] has the capability for insight detection, but no capability for wisdom. AI can surface observations in no time, but that alone doesn’t translate to action.”
Ultimately, the responsibility of bringing all these pieces together from multiple sources and translating them into a story that inspires action remains with the insights specialist.
“As AI and machine learning come into play in listening tools, they are doing all the heavy lifting for us and that means I can spend more time storytelling and uncovering unusual behaviors, insights and opportunities for the brands we work with. That is so exciting for me.”
As we’ve seen above, there’s no shortage of work to do in the rapidly changing world of the analyst. While much of that work will involve employing tools that can automate some of the heavy lifting, the prospect of collaboration, developing creativity and raising the profile of insights teams across organizations should make 2019 an exciting one for analysts at any level.
Here’s a checklist of skills that you can run through with your team to see what improvements can be made heading into the new year.