At a recent Social Media Breakfast of Houston, self-proclaimed digital anthropologist Sherry Thomas shared with Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse her expert insights on how businesses can harness data to build stronger customer connections.
Sherry, founder of HXA Consulting, is a powerhouse in decoding online behavior for strategic decision-making. She understands that fully connecting with customers requires tapping into their emotions, behaviors, and online interactions. With over 25 years of experience, including leading social intelligence programs for Nike and EY, as well as serving as an intelligence specialist for the U.S. Department of Defense, she believes technology should always serve people. “In all my tech career I was designing technology to work for humans and basically training humans to work with technology.”
Building a Comprehensive Data Picture
To truly understand customers, businesses need to create a comprehensive, data-driven profile that includes customer data, behavioral data, and social data. “What we're talking about here is sort of all three of those sort of coming together as a full view of the customer,” Sherry explains.
Technology plays a key role in gathering and analyzing this data, but it’s essential to recognize its limitations. AI, for example, is still evolving. “We're at the baby stage of AI and AI is still learning our languages,” she notes. “There's limitations to AI today, so I think that's weirdly a relief to a lot of people to know that you still need a human interaction. There's a lot that you need to do to touch the data yourself to get it to the insights piece.”
Gathering Actionable Social Insights
For businesses working with limited budgets and without a social listening service or agency, Sherry recommends focusing on key data sources, arguing that manual searches can be enormously powerful. “What you want to see is keywords that people tend to gather around,” she advises. “See what's trending online in your industry, so you want to look at competitors, that kind of thing, and the hashtags are a way of people finding each other online.”
Beyond keywords and trends, she emphasizes the importance of analyzing comments and mentions. “If you've got a lot of social content, people have comments in there. That's a rich piece of data,” she says. Mentions, especially user-generated content, are another goldmine of insights. “So any [user-generated content]… And then [look at things] at the brand level because there could be events there, could be things that pop off in the media that you don't know about…. [that] you could jump on and get more attraction with.”
Understanding the broader industry landscape is equally critical. “This is one that a lot of people forget to do,” she explains. “When I'm trying to sell… I'm going to go look at what [competitors are] selling, how they're selling it, what they're doing, who's the most engaged, who's got the people that I want.”
Analyzing and Measuring Data for Impact
Once data is collected, it needs to be structured and analyzed for actionable insights. Sherry suggests starting with a simple and free tool: Excel. “You start categorizing and what you start to see is the same three topics, the same two things, that people tend to complain about over time,” she says. “This is going to be data that gets stronger over time and then same thing for positive topics.” Identifying recurring themes allows brands and businesses to address pain points while amplifying what customers already like.
However, working with social data isn’t always straightforward. “Social data can drive you crazy if you are a Type A data analyst who needs exact numbers, who likes math. [Instead, this type of data] is directional data,” she says. “When people talk about this as a ‘data science’ it's a different type of data science… it's a little bit squishy and you really have to get comfortable putting quantitative numbers on qualitative data.”
Data-Driven Strategy with a Human Touch
Sherry outlines her entire process through the AIM Framework.
To hear all of Sherry’s insights and recommendations, be sure to watch the full livestream.