Ana Talavera

You’ve been recognised three times now. What do you think your work stands for?

I think my work stands for paying attention where others tend to rush past. Part of that comes from a background beyond screens, theatre and dance trained me to read bodies, pauses, rhythm, and emotion long before I ever looked at dashboards. On stage, you learn quickly that meaning isn’t just in words, but in timing, tension, and what’s left unsaid. That sensibility naturally shaped how I work with data. I don’t see intelligence as something rigid or purely technical. It’s more like a craft, observing, interpreting, and connecting signals with care. If my work stands for anything, it’s the belief that understanding culture takes both structure and sensitivity, and a tolerance for not having a clean answer right away.

What’s a hard truth you’ve learned about doing meaningful insight work inside real organisations?

That insight only works when people are willing to slow down just enough to let it land. The hardest part isn’t building the analysis, it’s creating space for interpretation in environments optimized for speed, certainty, and quick answers. Meaningful insight often challenges timelines, hierarchies, and habits. It complicates neat narratives and resists easy conclusions. That can be uncomfortable inside real organisations. But when teams are brought into the process, when methods are transparent and interpretation is shared, trust builds. And without trust, even the strongest insight doesn’t travel very far.

Has your perspective on social intelligence changed since you first started working in the industry?

Yes! Especially after leading the second edition of Brazil’s Social Listening Industry Research and spending time understanding how people in the field are actually working today. It became clear that social listening is going through a rebranding moment. Suddenly it’s called intelligence, culture, foresight, trends, AI-powered insights. Some of that evolution makes sense. Some of it… less so. The risk is confusing new labels with real progress. Changing the name doesn’t automatically make the work deeper, more ethical, or more useful. What changed for me was learning to be sharper than the wave to tell the difference between what’s genuinely shifting, like platforms, data access, and automation, and what’s mostly just a new coat of paint.

What’s a piece of advice or framing you’ve passed on to others that seems to stick?

That social listening needs the same methodological clarity we expect from both research and technology. In field research, you’re explicit about what was collected, where, for how long, and with which limitations. In tech, you document systems, assumptions, coverage, and edge cases. Social listening should borrow from both. The advice that sticks is simple: make the methodology visible. Be clear about sources, scope, coverage, and what the data can and can’t support. When that’s fuzzy, even good insights lose credibility. Clear methodologies, shared playbooks, and simple documentation don’t make the work rigid, they make interpretation stronger, easier to question, and easier to defend.

What’s the one question you think the industry needs to be asking right now, but isn’t?

I would say: “how are our tools shaping what we’re able to see and what are they quietly making invisible?”. We talk a lot about speed, automation, and AI-generated outputs, but not enough about how platform constraints, algorithms, and data access shape interpretation itself. Until we take that seriously, we’ll keep mistaking availability for truth and summaries for insight. The future of the field depends less on collecting more signals and more on being critical about the lenses we use to read them.

What’s something you once believed about audiences, platforms, or culture that you’ve changed your mind about?

I used to believe that more data would eventually lead to more clarity. Now I know clarity comes from context, not volume. Audiences aren’t inconsistent, they’re adaptive. Platforms aren’t neutral, they shape expression. Culture doesn’t move in straight lines; it moves through tension, irony, and silence as much as through visibility. Once you accept that, the work stops being about simplifying behavior and starts being about understanding conditions. That shift changed everything for me.

You’ve built your leadership and credibility. Now what do you want to build next? For the field, not just yourself?

I want to help the discipline become easier to understand, practice, and trust. The work has grown more complex, but the way we explain how we do it hasn’t evolved at the same pace. What I’m interested in building next is clearer structure around methods, interpretation, and decision-making. That means making the how more visible: how questions are framed, how coverage is defined, how judgment is applied, and how limits are acknowledged. When those things are explicit, tools actually work better, not harder. The goal isn’t to standardize creativity out of the work, but to give the discipline enough clarity that insight doesn’t feel improvised or dependent on individual intuition alone.

‍