After nearly three years managing the social media and healthcare practices at the Lab, Raquel Krouse recently joined the Initiative Media team as SVP, Director for Prophesee social solutions, the agency’s social media unit. We sat down to talk about her new role, and how Prophesee aims to give brands better ways to listen and engage consumers online.
Q: You’ve done exciting work in social media over the past few years; how does Prophesee fit into the social media narrative?
A: When talking about developing a social media strategy, I’ve always stressed listening as an essential first step. But it’s really about active listening. Prophesee not only provides solutions to monitor online chatter, but also provides the services to help brands understand and effectively act upon online buzz.
Q: What’s different about Prophesee, and why now?
A:Â The Prophesee solutions unit brings together professional analysts, leading-edge technology, process-driven strategic thinking and inspired activation. Â Rather than selling technology, Prophesee aims to provide answers to questions and solutions to business objectives. There are a lot of social media monitoring tools in the marketplace with different strengths and approaches. Prophesee stands out as having a unique capability, always selecting the best tools to fulfill a winning strategy and never building a strategy around particular tools.
Q: We’ve talked about how “social media†is a phrase that may go away eventually because all media will be social media. How does a brand keep track of the conversations, when they are happening all the time, everywhere, including via our TVs and even through out of home and print solutions?
A: It’s true. Often conversations can start on one place, and then splinter into multiple locations and media channels, making conversations difficult to monitor over time. Wherever possible, Prophesee will be looking to add new monitoring tools to the mix. For instance, we are developing a new tool that can ascribe sentiment to all of the comments made around videos, add context to the comments by categorizing them by topic and rank the people making the comments by an authority score based on how popular they are. With the proliferation of new broadband-connected TVs, it’s easy to imagine this video monitoring capability entering the living room.
Q: What are you most excited about your new role?
A:  Prophesee already has a proven track record of successful projects for big-name brands and is recognized as a leader for market-leading buzz monitoring tools. I’m most excited about extending the brand to cover a full range of social media solutions and to developing new ways for brands to engage in meaningful value exchanges with their customers.
Raquel can be reached via email at [email protected]
