April 10, 2018. Dark social, even though we can’t see it or know what it is, is here. And we should fear it.
via Dark Social is Dangerous — Gareth Roberts
Read through the post, and realized that the title is a bit off. It’s not that Social Media is sending some dangerous traffic, but that the traffic being sent is being incorrectly measured as Direct traffic and therefore, difficult to act upon. This misdirection can lead to a lot of tactical mistakes.
What’s more interesting is the story about World War II that Gareth has nicely illustrated. The deaths due to a D-Day rehearsal were more than D-Day itself. The reason behind this is people coming to the wrong conclusions because of the data made available.
A light skim of this article might put me off Social Media as a marketing channel. As it is I am a bit biased against it, but this would have put the final nail in the coffin. However … this is the blind spot that I am referring to.
Slight misinformation, and there we go jumping to the wrong conclusions. As an analyst, something that you might want to keep in mind is the quality and the veracity of the data that you analyze.