sfiddles

Hey Nathan! As a marketer, it's pretty hit or miss when creating a viral sensation - and you often have no idea how well/poorly some new bit of content will do. I was curious how you develop your "unorthodox tactics" or if you have a method to your (hilariously awesome) madness. Is it trial-by-error, gut intuition or are you just a master of popular imagination? Thank you!

This is a good question I constantly ask myself as an online marketer. Often after purchasing something from Amazon, I'll see it show up in my social feed on FB immediately after. When will big data get "smarter"?

Jen will be answering questions live from 2-4pm. She created this thread a bit earlier than normal so that we could populate with questions, although maybe she didn't anticipate this large of a response.

Yes, quite a revelation. If you work in marketing, you know that there is a lot of sharing of data between the two, in the form of "retargeting". Basically your shopping habits on Amazon are tracked and FB gets a hold of this info and then tries to retarget you with sales, discounts or a reminder of that thing you wanted. This is all done easily with tracking links, however, my point is that these links persist even after a successful sale or purchase. In a smart big data world, you wouldn't try to sell someone the same thing twice. You want to see complimentary goods or something they haven't bought already.

It seems that while many people are absolutely terrified by the NSA's privacy breeches, a good cross section of those people have almost no problem with self-identifying and providing personal information on social media (including the use of GPS tracking and checkins).

It would be interesting if you could speak to the psychology behind this. Seems like cognitive dissonance, but both achieve the same ends - getting your personal info out on the interwebs.