Thursday, July 30, 2015

Tapping Dark Social


Are we as marketers correctly trying to understand the worth of communication that is not passing through the mainstream communication channels? It is a well know fact that people prefer to communicate through their preferred private channels with their loved and beloved ones. They talk truth here. They pass on facts here. They open their hearts here. However, it seems either don’t know how to tap this source or simply acting in such a way that this kind of channel does not exist. By the way, the market categorizes this private communication channel under DARK SOCIAL [with love].

Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, My Space, etc., are history now. This post-Snowden era, the most happening social media place is either the private communication channel or anonymous social networking channel. They say that 70% of the communication that is mostly useful for marketers, sales people, etc., happen in these two channels.

Now the trillion dollar question is about how we can tap the value of these private and anonymous communication channels where people open their hearts and talk facts without any fear and favor. This blog suggests one thing; accessing private communications is next to impossible. However, why not build an anonymous social networking site and attract people to talk, share, and discuss whatever they want, whenever they want, and whichever topic they want.


The advantage here is that you as a marketer can throw a topic in the discussion ring and see what people say against that topic. This way, you will come to know the real-time sentiment analytics part of the particular topic and you can add these results to your sentiment analytics search stuff to get make them more precision oriented. 

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Dark Social




Your friends call you a Facebook pro. And everyone knows that tweeting gives your heavenly pleasure. Besides, you have a website which lists out funny things. All your friends and their friends’ visit your site at least once in a day. Analysts envy the visitor statistics of your site. Google search always list your site in the No. 1 position. And market investors estimated your site is worth a few millions based on the eyeballs it attracts. Every day is a fun day for you! And you are light speeding your way in to the billionaire’s league. Then… suddenly something happened! 

Your website eyeball count started crashing. Your website analytics are not reflecting the actual statistics. Market investors are dragging down your million dollars’ worth! What is happening?

You force exit of your dream world, enters real-world, sit before your system, and starts going through the visitor analytics statistics. While trying to understand why suddenly visitors are not coming to your site, you would like to know more about your influencer websites who used to direct traffic to your site and would like to check whether they are doing the same thing even now! But, alas! What you find? Most [60%] of the URLs are without UTM parameters and they are all bucketed under ‘Direct Traffic’. 

Where from this direct traffic is coming? There is no origin; seems like that the links have been shared between visitors through some private means like emails, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. There is no chance to find out the referral source. All these direct traffic URLs falls under Dark Social. 

There is no way to decode Dark Social… And there is no way to find why the traffic to your site has come down abruptly now!

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

End of the ‘Breaking News’ Saga




A few years ago, when the TV channels have started broadcasting the so called ‘Breaking News’, did they ever think that in the next few years, analytics would spread like wildfire across all the domains and it puts the ‘power of analysis’ at the fingertips of an educated common man? No, right. If yes, the broadcasters would have found a different route to commercialize their content. They might have added a different recipe to make their news spicier instead of feeding their audience the same old rut again and again over a period of time. 

Let’s discuss about any day’s breaking news protagonists (for whatever reason!); for example: Sushma Swaraj & Vasundhara Raje. Run any sentiment analytics engine that is available for free on the Net with these two names over a period of 5 hours; as a reader, you would come to know whether their popularity index is rising or going down and who is supporting them and what they were saying, how many unique people have made comments (positive/negative/neutral) about these public figures (for whatever reasons!). 

Whatever details you see here is what the TV people have been selling us since a long time in the name of Breaking News! All the details without advertisements! And for FREE!
Now, when news websites push to us selected news (by us!) and sentiment analytics engine let us know the opinion strength of the news, why in this world do we still need Breaking News? 

Think about it!