Interview: In Conversation with The Economist on Social Intelligence

One of the most important aspects of understanding social and making the most of it is ensuring that insights actually get used.

It’s no use spending thousands of dollars on an excellent platform if all of the business-improving intelligence is held by one team.

So how does a global publishing powerhouse ensure that social intelligence is activated among its 2,000 employees, and that it’s at the cutting edge of social practices?

We sat down with Tim Grimes, Social Media Manager of The Economist, to discuss this – and other hot topics, like understanding influencers, and using social intelligence to drive subscriptions.

The Economist: an integral relationship with social

The Economist, an English-language weekly newspaper, was founded in London in 1843.

The publication covers current affairs and cultural events, and enjoys a weekly circulation of over 1.5 million – with four-fifths of this outside the UK.

As well as the print edition, there’s the hugely successful online subscription model, Economist.com, as well as apps and newsletters for its members.

A lot of Tim’s role involves maximizing the reach of this brand through social, encouraging engagement, and understanding the landscape it sits in.

Clearly, The Economist understands the importance of social, as Tim explains.

“Social is one of the key focuses of the business.

Without the social side of it, there would likely be a 25% drop in traffic – so it is a key part of the business for us.

Also, from an editorial perspective, all our journalists are very clued-up on the social aspect and publish a lot of articles on their channels, do a lot of reporting, do live Q&As.

We’ve had Zani, our Editor in Chief, do live Q&As on Facebook – so there’s an obvious understanding that social is a key role in the business, and I think it always will be.”

Behind the scenes: employee advocacy

This understanding of the importance of social permeates into the newsroom.

We asked Tim about employee advocacy – one of the emerging use-cases for social data of last year, and likely to continue in 2016.

Google Trends search volume for employee advocacy soared in 2015, more than doubling on 2014 search data.

A Harvard Business School study in 2013 revealed that 71% of respondents ranked employee engagement as very important to achieving overall organizational success.

And of course – who better to promote an organization than its own employees?

Such activity can help shape online reputation, even of a brand that’s been going since the 1800s.

Tim agreed this is incredibly important.

“This is something that I want to work on further, and get the company as a whole sharing content more.

The editorial team are great at it. I think when you’ve got nearly 2,000 employees and, let’s be honest, your employees are the best advocates for the business, there’s definitely scope for people to share content – whether that’s internally or externally across the platform.

One of the tools we’ve set up for this is a leaderboard on Brandwatch that’s monitoring all our editors – such as how many links they are posting each week, what kind of impressions they’re getting, what kind of reach and what kind of engagement.

There’s definitely scope for us to do more internally and externally as well.”

We’re certainly seeing more of this as a use-case for social media intelligence, across all sectors.

A study by MSL Group found that this activity hugely increases brand messaging – it’s unsurprising The Economist is on board.