Libba Peromsik

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

What I’m most proud of is the way my work evolved with the industry. I started dabbling in social listening as a side project in the early days of the field. But as the capabilities became more advanced and the insights we could extract became more meaningful, I developed a new role and function from scratch, demonstrated the value to my org, gained buy-in from executives, and was ultimately able to build a dedicated social insights discipline from the ground up.

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

Being on the research and insights side of a large matrixed organization, we don’t always get to see the downstream impact of our work, but it can be very satisfying when we do.

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

Yes, absolutely. When I first started working in the industry, social intelligence was considered a “nice-to-have” rather than a “must-have” and I was doing some social listening on the side of my real job as a CRM manager. As social media evolved to become such a ubiquitous part of daily life, social intelligence became an increasingly more valuable and essential research function.

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

One piece of advice I give my team is to focus on what people need, not strictly what they ask for. (Note: This works great in a social intelligence setting but also in life.)

As the social insights experts, we are the most qualified to determine how social data can best be used to answer a business question or satisfy a clients’ needs. The key is to ask the right questions and get to the crux of the matter at hand but then let your expertise and intuition guide you.

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

With the recent proliferation of AI-generated content on social media, I think we need to talk more about how social platforms will be able to maintain the level of authenticity and human connection that helped drive adoption in the first place.

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

I used to think of social media as a “second screen” for our TV and streaming audiences — a parallel activity that viewers could post from or passively scroll through while watching the main event. But I see the two worlds as having a much more symbiotic relationship now. The social media audience has actually become an integral part of the ecosystem, building communities, driving fandom, and even influencing the in-show narrative.

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

Right now, I’m working on a really exciting project to better democratize social insights within my organization. In the field at large, I’m going to keep championing the need for expanded social data access, particularly for platforms with limited API options like TikTok.

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