Dan Hindin

Let’s start simple. Who are you, and what do you do with social data that others might not expect?

Hey, I’m Dan! I lead Social Intelligence at Pfizer. My role is a bit unique in that I sit within our Chief Marketing Office, and my team directly impacts marketing and advertising decisions, whereas many folks in the social listening industry sit in Communications, Customer Care, etc. Our mandate is to drive marketing actions, and our data is often presented alongside digital ad performance data and web analytics. So, while social listening is often qualitative, I try to also frame our data in a quantitative way to best speak the language of our stakeholders.

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What’s something in our industry we pretend to understand, but don’t?

Something that has concerned me about our industry for a long time is the lack of listening data across social channels beyond X and Reddit. We need to be honest with ourselves that our data is very skewed. This can have dramatic implications regarding demographics, politics and even media type. With ~70% of social interaction coming via video, transcription capabilities will be key moving forward to ensure we’re capturing that engagement and the populations (generally younger, more liberal and more urban) who are engaging on video-first platforms. Even as I write this, Reddit has just made a concerning move making their data less accessible. It’s important to note that listening does have plenty of advantages over other types of research – we’re capturing unfiltered opinions in the wild, insights can be discovered in near-real time, we can get our arms around dimensional metrics like velocity, etc. But do we truly have an unbiased understanding of a diverse population’s opinion? No.

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What’s a moment this year where social data helped your team do something bolder, faster, or better?

I’m proud of how our team used social intelligence to persuade multiple brand teams to build a presence on Reddit for the first time in 2025. Once we were able to convincingly show the volume, quality and focus on treatment of conversations consistently taking place on the platform, we saw marketers react by creating Reddit campaigns, hosting AMAs and adding Reddit to paid search terms, with encouraging results.

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What’s one belief about your audience that social data completely upended for your teams?

Working at Pfizer amid the rapidly evolving political environment in the U.S., I spent a lot of time focused on public sentiment around vaccines. My team and I developed a set of custom metrics to monitor changes in sentiment across multiple vaccine types and among several key stakeholder groups. The most surprising learning for many of us is how divided healthcare professionals have been on the topic.

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If you could build your dream social intelligence team from scratch, with no legacy and no limits, what roles would you include?

Tops on my wish list would be someone with deep expertise in AI. Our self-taught team is already overachieving in this area having built several custom agents, but I know there’s much more we could do. I’d also like someone focused on strategy to put a finer point on turning insights into actionable recommendations, a data scientist to push us further into the statistical and predictive realm, and a dedicated project manager to keep everything running smoothly.

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When do you feel like you’re doing your best work?

When I’m surrounded by amazing colleagues like so many I work alongside at Pfizer whose intellect, passion and support drive me to do better every day.

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What’s your browser history giving away about you this week?

My browser history shows that I…
Was in Costa Rica and curious about trying new foods
Am an avid runner who is getting old and interested in recovery shoes
Am a voracious audio book listener and searching for my next read
Am getting impatient for the kayak I want to come back in stock (and also for spring)
Am planning my next trip to Portugal this summer

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