In her new role, she will be tasked with enhancing social media marketing and research to the product development team at Vision Critical, including offering clients new ways of extracting customer insights from the combination of community panels and social media monitoring.

 “Social media has given marketers a new set of tools for engaging with customers and hearing what they say about you,” Samuel says. “But turning that buzz into actionable insight requires the kind of hard data and rigorous analysis you can only get from a recruited panel of customers who are talking directly to you. Vision Critical is in a unique position to turn social media noise into meaningful customer insights.”

Prior to joining Vision Critical, Samuel most recently served as the director of social & interactive media at Emily Carr University where she collaborated with Vision Critical on a major study of social media users. She was the founder of social media agency Social Signal and is the social media blogger for Harvard Business Review.