Nikki Smathers’ Post

I keep coming back to the same question: How do we understand modern human behavior with the way people communicate now? It’s not just tracking sentiment and counting mentions. Today, culture lives in the world of short-form video (TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube), a landscape defined by visual language, irony, reactions, and emotions in real time. People don’t just tell us what matters to them anymore. They show us. That’s what led me to Forage. What immediately stood out to me was that Forage doesn’t treat social media like a pile of flat metrics or use one influencer's reel to prove a point. They treat it like human behavior, looking beyond clicks and conversions to understand how brands actually show up in culture (emotionally, visually, and socially), at scale, beyond today’s tools. That feels much closer to where the future of insights is heading. So I’m excited to officially share that I’ve joined Forage as Director of Social Insights Partnerships. I’m so excited to be building in a space that’s changing this fast!