It was in year 1920, when Edward Bernays (nephew of famous psychologist Sigmund Freud) who pioneered application of psychoanalytical techniques on the masses for advertising, asked a simple question …..“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”
He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the "Engineering of consent.”. He observed...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Fast Forward to year 2009, the Netizens are hooked up to Internet spending, more & more time online (especially on Social Networks which have become hubs of social interaction). Many of the new sites, thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, have allowed for the easy creation of heaps of digital data. With Blogs, Social networks, RSS feeds, Flickr feeds, Twitter messages, video clips…the data just keeps growing on and on and sharing information becoming as easy as tweeting from your cell.
There is an emergence of what people call, “River of news” — where stories would flow as a river and you would dip in and drink what you could. As bandwidth (and connectivity) grows, we would be using the web more, including sharing more and more objects. With our innate human need to interact with one another in this connected world, we try to mimic our offline interactions online in real time. It’s a way to share your life, your opinions, with those close to you, no matter how far away. With more than 175 million people signed up across the planet, Facebook in many ways has started to resemble our real-life social networks.
This has given an entirely new dimension to public opinion & online social networks, making it more powerful and disruptive than ever before. Instance like the Kryptonite scandal, where a small kid sitting in his basement almost drove a company to bankruptcy within 9 days by just blogging about it, has given nightmares to every CEO on this planet.
Today we are sharing links, text messages and photos in these streams. Videos or video life streams come later. These streams are more relevant mostly because the context comes from our social graph.
The online world is in a dying need of A Psychoanalyst, another Edward Bernays, one who could understand user’s online behavior and tap these vast amounts of data for business & commercial purpose…Welcome to the world of WEB ANALYTICS…A land where complex algorithms based on tools like, Recommender systems, Collaborative filtering, Information Scent, can read your mind, understand your underlying intentions, without even letting you know…spooky isn’t it ?
Web analytics (in simple terms) measure a visitor's online journey. It includes the measurement of a website's potential audience (opportunity), share of voice (visibility), and buzz (comments) that is happening on the Internet as a whole, assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits. Calculating Information Scent, which measures how attractive is a particular link, which could compel a user to click & follow it (or in other words how strong the is scent..??)
Armed with cutting edge algorithms & technologies like Click Stream analysis that collect data about user movements on a website, keeping a track of the links visited, including where a user came from, their route through the website and their destination on exiting the site. Link analysis can include observations of the links clicked and their associated position on the screen, time spent within a web page and making connections between links visited and consequences (e.g. purchase made). Others include techniques like Collaborative Filtering, which compares user’s tastes with those of other users in order to build up a picture of like-minded people. The choice of content is then based on the assumption that this particular user will value that which the like-minded people also enjoyed. The preferences of the community of like-minded people are used to predict appropriate content. Some of the online social networking sites are planning to model the social graph of its members. By this they mean that they want to model the relationships between all people.
So while on Facebook, whenever you are taking a quiz, becoming a fan, commenting, etc. the algorithm crawls looking out for your data, knowing more and more about you, studying you, analyzing you.
A typical a Dominant Social Metric for analyzing a person can consist of parameters like:-
Cognitive Similarity
Tie-Strength (Relationship Duration, Interaction Frequency, Closeness)
Trust (Competence, Benevolence, Integrity)
Social Capital (Reputation)
In fact, Facebook will soon be debuting a “Social Rank” algorithm which determines which of your friends are most relevant and important to the task at hand.
This understanding of user behavior and hyper connectivity can have amazing and limitless possibilities in future. Imagine a service that would scan through your twitter messages, your news feeds or communities and marry them to data on internet, such as a nearby movie theater or a mall and Bluecasting it on your cell phone, as to whom you can contact for what& giving suggestions tailored exactly to your taste, an ultimate mash-ups of diverse data sources keeping you in mind… Interesting isn’t it?
