There’s a popular phrase on the Internet, “In Real Life”. Usually it’s used to distinguish between the real life where everybody has a job and responsibilities and the wacky hi-jinks of the Internet. The problem, of course, is that the difference is becoming increasingly blurry, both in terms of our daily life reflecting on our internet personas, through data harvesting pushes from the likes of Facebook or G+ in order to ensure that profiles are real and accurate as well as the internet impacting real world decisions.
Facebook Knows Where You Shop
Search engine optimization agencies have been influencing our browsing and, implicitly, shopping behavior for years now but the influence was still relegated to the Internet. Now, through Facebook’s partnership with several large data mining companies the social network will have access to your offline shopping habits, thanks to data from your loyalty programs. Yes, that free loyalty card that you’re carrying around in your wallet is Facebook’s ticket to more data points. Of course the company won’t be sharing the data with anybody else but it will use it to boost its advertising revenue through its Custom Audiences program. Furthermore, thanks to its wellspring of data Facebook will now be offering a Lookalike audience feature to advertising, helping them reach users with similar habits to those already patronizing a business.
Tweets are the new Nielsen Ratings
A study conducted earlier this year has shed some light into one of the most baffling inconsistencies in television. The discrepancy between Nielsen ratings and advertising revenue on several critically acclaimed series. Series like Mad Men or Girls have had difficulty breaking the 3.0 Nielsen rating and yet they are almost all very popular with advertisers and have rabid fanbases. Until recently, marketing experts were happy to explain this inexplicable investment focus through the desire of certain advertisers to fund critically acclaimed shows. Now a new study shows that there are three factors that prop up a show: it’s ratings from the prior year, advertising budgets and twitter hashtags. Yes, the social media presence of fans influences ratings and leads to shown getting a lot more ‘love’ from advertisers than just the Nielsen ratings would warrant. This is because a lot of times the same people that are hashtag happy are also from crucial marketing demographics like 18-25 and 25-35. Advertising are simply eschewing nationwide ratings and focusing on Generation Y.
Google+ is Growing
Google+ isn’t the biggest social network out there but it’s growing and soon enough it might be growing into the real world. The advent of Google glass and Google integration with real world situations like real-time translation and easy unobtrusive video capture might change how we interact in real life as well as our definition of privacy in the very near future. This all integrates to Google+, the default social network for Glass and if the new Google gadget manages to find a sizeable market we might be looking at a new lease on life for the Google social Network, as well as a lot of new data for the company to mine.
