1. Discuss the value of social data for marketers.
2. A "dark social channel" refers to a private channel or a channel difficult to match with other digital channels. An example of a dark channel is email. However, Google routinely mines its roughly half-billion Gmail users' emails. Research how Google scans email data and the fallout from those actions, then summarize your findings.
People have been using Twitter's social media platform to Tweet short bursts of information in 140 characters or less since 2006 and now average 500 million Tweets a day. The full stream of Tweets is referred to as Twitter's fire hose. Various firms analyze data from the fire hose and sell the information gleaned from that analysis to other companies. Twitter recently purchased Gnip, the world's largest social data provider and one of the few companies that had access to the fire hose. Gnip also mines public data from Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, and other social media platforms. Analyzing social data has become a big business because companies such PepsiCo, Warner Brothers, and General Motors pay to learn about consumers' sentiments toward them. According to the CEO of social media analysis company BrandWatch, "We're at the bottom of the foothills in terms of the kind of global demand for social data." Twitter alone earned more than $70 million last year from licensing its data. Perhaps Mark Twain's character, Mulberry Sellers, summed it up nicely-"There's gold in them thar hills"-and Twitter and other social media platforms and data analytic companies are mining that gold.