Joe Colacurcio

Let’s start with you. Who are you, and what lens do you bring to understanding people online?

I’m Joe Colacurcio and I lead the Insights & Analytics team for Weber Shandwick’s Central Region - North America. I view people online through the lens of community and collective interests. Social intelligence is most powerful when it moves beyond individual comments to identify insights based on the shared passions, values, and ‘lingo’ that unite people into communities. This approach helps us understand the cultural context that drives conversations, so we can advise brands on how to participate in a way that is authentic and adds value. As an industry, to continue to be effective we need to continue to go beyond merely ‘monitoring conversations’ to truly understanding the role a brand can and should play within culture.

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What’s a working theory you have right now about how people behave online?

A working theory that I have is that, especially due to the relatively high uncertainty in today's overall political and socioeconomic climate, people are increasingly seeking connection in more intimate, community-driven online spaces. Think less public square, more semi-private club.

Generally speaking it feels influence is more decentralized, and I see this playing out in the rise of forums like Reddit, and communal platforms like Discord and Substack. These are goldmines for authentic, unprompted insights that are largely untapped and go beyond the convention of influence coming only from Instagram and TikTok creators.

What’s truly exciting is that with the rise of AI, we can now understand the richness of these conversations at greater scale more quickly. I’m optimistic that this will help us guide brands to build more genuine connections with communities, based on a much deeper understanding of what they truly care about.

What’s an insight you surfaced that you still think about? What one stuck with you?

A favorite example of mine is our continued work on the Pop-Tarts Bowl, and how it all started - just by focusing in on the actual desires of our target audience - Gen Z. We realized they're totally over boring, traditional sponsorships, but they have a huge appetite for absurd, meme-worthy moments. So the insight was simple: instead of acting like a stuffy sponsor, let's just get weird and give them something hilarious to talk about. That's how the now-infamous edible mascot was born. It's a great reminder that if you really get a community’s sense of humor, they’ll blow it up for you. PRWeek even did a whole story on how it all went down.

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What’s the weirdest rabbit hole your work has ever sent you down? And what did it teach you?

Earlier on in my career, we were using social intelligence to inform our client’s understanding of artificial sweeteners, and we were using a variety of tools to help us with this. What we unearthed was that there’s darker corners of the internet that we need to consider when we’re constructing how we balance the precision and recall of our Boolean queries, as not every type of conversation is appropriate to consider from a proactive communications or marketing perspective. But, those same types of darker corners can help inform issues preparedness, and should be “carved out” and analyzed as such.

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What skills or mindsets do you think the next generation of analysts will need?

I believe the most essential mindset for the next generation of analysts will always be innate curiosity. While the tools are evolving with AI, the critical skills are embracing greater humanity, not less.

The future isn't about pure technical prowess, but about being a great collaborator with AI. This means having the logical thinking to ask the right questions and the critical eye to spot issues not only with potential input data quality, but also outputs from such LLMs and tools that we will use or have always used.

Above all, at least for me, the most vital skill is storytelling. The ability to take complex data, whether from AI or traditional research, and weave it into a compelling human narrative that inspires action is what will truly set the next generation of analysts apart.
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What’s a niche community, account, or corner of the internet you’re watching right now? And why?

To be honest, I’m still wrapping my head around the online fandom that erupted in late 2025 around the HBO Max show, ‘Heated Rivalry.’ As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, it was personally moving to see that fandom create such a passionate, universal sense of belonging. Professionally, it was a profound lesson. It was a powerful confirmation of my belief - referenced in a prior answer - that the most resonant cultural moments happen when a deep human need is met—in this case, for representation and shared community. It’s a critical reminder for our industry that true relevance comes not from just targeting a demographic, but from genuinely understanding and serving the need for connection that defines a community. Developing strategies on how brands can embrace that, or any type of fandom, continues to define the role that we can play as communicators and marketers gleaning insights from social intelligence.
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Last non-work thing you read that shaped your thinking?

I’m currently reading ‘The Courage to be Disliked’ by Ichiro KIshimi and Fumitake Koga. It’s a very powerful perspective that underscores the realities that we create for ourselves are rarely often the same or similar to the realities that others have created for themselves. Relating this to my professional life, this means that marketers are tasked with tough job in working to UNDERSTAND why we as humans think, feel, and do, and the choices we make, as consumers. And therein lies why I love social intelligence - it helps provide that lens.

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