About

I'm Ben Ellis, a freelance social intelligence strategist based in London. For close to twenty years I've worked every side of this field: brand-side, agency, a social listening vendor, and inside a social media platform itself. That route taught me that where you sit changes what you see; the same audience reads differently from a brand's seat than from a platform's, and the real work is reconciling those readings into something honest about the people underneath the data.

Here is the frame I work from. Social intelligence is not the mere extraction of insights from social media; it is the disciplined study of how human beings perform identity, negotiate meaning, seek status, form perception, and respond to systems of visibility under algorithmic conditions. The tooling is the easy part. The work is interpretation: treating data as constructed observation rather than neutral truth, reading quantitative signals to find where pressure exists and qualitative detail to understand what that pressure means. The job is doing both well, not choosing between them.

I arrived here sideways. Italian by nationality, Ghanaian by heritage, a linguistics student who left the degree but kept the questions. I write poetry and I take photographs, and I've stopped pretending either is separate from the analytical work; a dashboard is a frame, a query is a frame, and choosing what to look at is the same discipline in every case.

This site is where I think in the open: about social intelligence as a method, about the theory and culture underneath the metrics, and now and then about the events and conversations moving the field. If any of it is useful to you, great. If you'd like to talk, the door is open.