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Let’s start simple. Who are you, and what do you do with social data that others might not expect?
I lead Simon & Schuster’s Audience Insights team, which aims to be a one-stop shop for questions colleagues might have about what is going on in the publishing industry and beyond – both through regularly scheduled reports, and through an ad hoc “help desk” that provides research support for more specific questions.
I’m also active in the puzzle community, where social data is surprisingly helpful. For instance, when I helped run the MIT Mystery Hunt in 2024 and proposed writing a puzzle homage to the immersive play Sleep No More, I needed to demonstrate that enough people were aware of the show to make the puzzles both fun and solvable.
That exercise is surprisingly transferable to traditional social listening: a crossword constructor might need to confirm that a critical mass of solvers are aware of the definition of “cruciverbalist” before using it in a puzzle. Meanwhile, book publishers need to know whether communities find meaning in phrases like “ergodic literature” or “LitRPG” before using those terms to describe the books we publish.
What’s something in our industry we pretend to understand, but don’t?
One of the greatest dangers in social intelligence is equating what’s easy to quantify and measure with what’s true. And as much as we’d like to present our findings as comprehensive, it’s just as important to highlight the gaps in our knowledge as it is to celebrate our discoveries.
Social intelligence is largely focused around monitoring public conversations in their many forms. We do not (and I would argue, should not) have full visibility into private social channels like Discord and Slack, let alone the person-to-person communications that accounts for some of the most impactful word-of-mouth recommendations.
And while there are research methodologies that can offer some visibility into those invisible conversations, there will always be gaps.
What’s a moment this year where social data helped your team do something bolder, faster, or better?
One of my favorite questions to field at work is “why is this book selling so well” – and one of the more interesting examples from 2025 surrounded the classic Western Lonesome Dove, which has seen a dramatic resurgence in popularity. That question sparked a dedicated round of research that led us to revisiting our strategy around the title, and those findings even helped inspire and frame coverage about the book in the New York Post.
What’s one belief about your audience that social data completely upended for your teams?
In May 2023, a Trigun fan account shared a glowing endorsement for the book This is How You Lose the Time War, launching the book onto the New York Times Bestseller list, years after its initial release.
The truly wonderful thing about working in book publishing is that when readers love a book, they’re practically itching for an excuse to talk about it. And while communities like BookTok are rightfully receiving accolades for creating spaces to share that enthusiasm, those conversations can and will happen anywhere.
This is How You Lose the Time War was an important reminder that sometimes, marketing is about giving people excuses to celebrate the things that they love.
If you could build your dream social intelligence team from scratch, with no legacy and no limits, what roles would you include?
Since we’re on the subject anyway: having a time traveler from the future with a photographic memory would be great – it’s so much easier to offer guidance on how to strategize for the future when you know what’s going to happen, ahead of time.
When do you feel like you’re doing your best work?
I’m at my best when social intelligence is a conversation rather than a lecture. I work with extremely smart colleagues, and every one of them is an expert on a topic I know nothing about. And since Simon & Schuster has been around so long, those colleagues are often benefiting from over a hundred years of institutional knowledge in their respective roles.
So while I can hole up in my office and pore through reams of data to come up with all sorts of theories about how to sell more books, it’s beyond foolish to do that without working with those colleagues to make sure we’re asking the right questions.
What’s your browser history giving away about you this week?
At the time that I’m writing this the final season of Stranger Things just dropped, and a significant portion of the internet is in the throes of a conspiracy theory known as “Conformity Gate”. Fans are having fun speculating that there will be a secret ninth episode going live on January 7th. As a Swiftie, I’m loving the unhinged creativity. And while I may be skeptical that a secret ninth episode actually exists, the discussion did lead me to revisit all the clues and easter eggs the show actually did hide, over the years.
Did you know if you called the Surfer Boy Pizza number from the show, you’d get a voicemail message that hid instructions on how to fill in the pegs on a virtual Lite Brite board? Or that Baskin-Robbins retrofitted select stores into Scoops Ahoy locations, complete with secret Russian code wheels? Global even launched WSQK as an in-universe radio station that operated for six weeks, while the final season aired.
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