Mobile, big data, and geo-location: Don’t risk a deadly misfire

Keep in mind for 311?

While recent innovations in mobile and big data have opened up avenues never before seen by marketers, for consumers, they risk quickly turning into just another means for spam. The cause is simple: most businesses simply aren’t diving deep enough; they have mountains of data at their disposal, but they’re only cracking the surface when it comes to making it actionable.

For organizations to really capitalize on this recent stream of innovation, they need to get smarter. The key here is time-based context: a customer could be a business traveler nine out of every 10 times he/she travels. But the one time they’re going on a family vacation, the hotel offers need to be family orientated, or they’re going to fall flat. Even worse: after receiving numerous irrelevant communications from a brand, it’s likely that the consumer will ignore that next email or offer — regardless of the channel it comes through. In this case, the marketing can actually have a negative effect on future sales.

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The Unlit Social Graph

A few years ago, it was not uncommon to hear search people talk about The Dark Web (also known as Dark Net or the Deep Web). Basically, the Dark Web is made up pages or files that are unreachable by search engines. Examples of this sort of content include information that sits behind login, or pages without inbound links. Some estimates put the Dark Web at about 400 times the size of the Surface Web (content indexed by search engines).

Google has invested tremendous resources in lighting up, or indexing these hidden pieces of content. An example of their efforts was their 2008 announcement that they could now index the contents of .PDF files, a “feat that requires and an immense amount of processing power.”

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