🗞️ In The News

• 🍪 ​Google Chrome Won't Roll Out Prompt To Turn Off Third-Party Cookies (SEOroundTable)

• 💬 ChatGPT Search Grew To 41.3 Million Users, Still Dwarfed By Google Search Tho (SearchEngineLand)

• 📈 Marketers Are ‘Scenario Planning’ In An Uncertain Economy (WSJ)

• 🤑 Good News: Recent Study Finds Consumers Will Pay Up To 25% More For Their Fav Brand (RetailDive)

🔗 Large On LinkedIn

• 🧬 The Boring Truth About AI: You’re Only As Good As Your Data - From Tom Goodwin (link)

• 🤖 15 Minutes, 5 Agents, 1 Product Created - From Jason Ross (link)

• 📈 Hooked on Performance Quick Wins? Why It’s Killing Your Brand Growth - From Preston Rutherford (link)

💼 Case Studies: Case Closed

• 🖱️ The Complete Guide To Commercial Intent Keywords, Because Why Else Do It? (SEMrush)

• 📸 5 Insane Growth Secrets Every Instagram Marketer Should Know (JediNews)

• 🗺️ The Complete Map To Marketing Planning Alongside Your Business (UpTempo)

🧰 You Won’t Blame These Tools

• 💡 Arcane - Your Always-on Content Marketing Feed - Working 24/7 to Suggest New Social & Blog Posts Relevant to your Business

• 🪄 MagicPublish - Ultra-Simple Social Tag, Meta Data and Title Generator

• 📹️ Magi-1 - Turn One Image into an Endless Video With Unmatched Quality.

NOT ALL SHARING IS CARING (FOR YOUR ANALYTICS ANYWAY) 🫲 

Let’s be clear: Dark Social isn’t some sneaky new thing. It’s how humans have always behaved online—long before we started calling every third tweet a "growth hack."

People naturally share good stuff privately. They text it. They DM it. They quietly pass it along in Slack threads titled “Random but actually good.”

And here’s the bit that'll make your marketing team cry into their KPI reports: this private sharing now accounts for more than half of all content sharing online. In some industries, it’s closer to 80%.

But because private shares don't leave neat little digital breadcrumbs, most of them get dumped in the “direct traffic” bucket in your analytics. Right next to actual direct visits like “typed in your URL” and “accidentally butt-dialled your homepage.”

If you’re still relying on last-click attribution, UTM links, or even glossy marketing mix models to prove your worth, here’s the brutal news: you’re mostly measuring the wrong things. Your best leads, your strongest brand advocates, and your most valuable traffic? They’re coming from a murky black hole your dashboards don’t even acknowledge.

And ignoring it doesn’t just mean missing out on better reporting. It means missing out on building actual trust, actual conversations, and actual loyalty—the stuff brands claim they care about (but rarely optimise for).

The internet’s real power has quietly shifted from public posting to private recommending.

Why? Because posting publicly takes on another dimension of risk and attention, we feel more judged - but sharing directly with friends or those we work closely with is far more low-profile. But it’s also far more powerful.

If you’re still playing the old game of public vanity metrics, you’re aiming for the wrong scoreboard.

THREE BIG TRUTHS ABOUT THE INTERNEST ‘ICEBERG’ ECONOMY 🧊 

1. People trust people, not platforms

The entire existence of influencers is proof of one thing: humans trust humans more than brands.
Not algorithms. Not ad targeting. Actual people.

When your mate sends you an article with a “thought of you” note attached, you read it. When some personal trainer you barely know posts a “life-changing” supplement link, you click. Sometimes you even buy—without checking the brand’s site, the reviews, or your dwindling bank balance.

Platforms amplify reach. But trust? That lives in the messy, magical spaces between people.
Dark social simply makes that fact uncomfortably obvious for marketers still clinging to last-click reports.

2. You can’t track everything—and that’s OK

If you're still hyperventilating because dark social isn’t neatly traceable... congratulations, you're alive and working in marketing.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: not everything needs to be perfectly measured.
Some of your best marketing efforts will only ever show up as mysterious spikes in direct traffic, or a random influx of high-quality leads you “definitely didn’t pay for.”

And you know what? That’s fine.
Dark social isn’t a glitch. It’s a sign you’re resonating.
Learn to watch for patterns, read between the data, and trust that some of the magic happens off-stage.

3. The most shareable content isn’t viral—it’s useful

Brands lose their minds chasing viral trends.
But in dark social, it’s not the trending TikTok dance that gets shared—it’s the actually useful stuff:

• That brutally helpful one-page checklist

• The oddly specific meme that nails your industry’s pain points

• The stat-filled thread you screenshot to settle a Slack argument

Viral content is loud, fleeting, performative.

Dark social content is quietly indispensable.

It’s the stuff people feel compelled to pass on, because it makes them look smart, thoughtful, or just plain helpful to the people they care about.

If you want to thrive in dark social, stop chasing noise. Start creating value.

WORKING IN THE SHADOWS, WITHOUT THE CREEPY FACTOR 👻 

Alright, theory’s great. But how do you actually use dark social without turning into that weird marketer who auto-DMs people AI-Generated “personalised offers” at 2AM?

Here’s your playbook:

• Create ridiculously useful content: Templates, guides, cheat sheets, behind-the-scenes insights. Stuff that makes someone’s life easier or their brain bigger in under five minutes. Think "you’ve-got-to-see-this" value, not "please clap" engagement.

• Make private sharing stupid-easy: If your content doesn’t have WhatsApp, Messenger, and Email share buttons baked in, you’re asking too much. Mobile-first sharing isn’t a feature anymore—it’s oxygen.

• Install “Where did you hear about us?” surveys: This is your best, most honest glimpse into dark social. Drop a simple, low-friction survey at signup, checkout, or first onboarding steps. Keep it simple (think dropdown or quick text field), and watch the real sources roll in—friends, colleagues, group chats, DMs. Absolute gold dust.

• Tag what you can, accept what you can’t: UTM parameters are boring but essential. Set up clean, consistent naming conventions for your campaigns. Then, let go. Some dark social sharing will always be invisible. (It's not a bug. It's humanity.)

• Invest in trust, not tricks: Dark social rewards brands that feel authentic, helpful, and worth recommending. It punishes those who scream for attention. Focus on building products, experiences, and content people want to quietly share.

Pitfall to avoid:
Don’t try to forcibly "track" everything. If you push too hard—embedding tracking pixels in private messages, over-engineering UTM tags—you’ll kill the vibe faster than an unsolicited LinkedIn pitch.

Tools worth knowing:

• ShareThis and AddThis for private sharing buttons

• Bitly or Rebrandly for clean, trackable links

• Hotjar or Typeform for “Where did you hear about us?” feedback surveys

• Slack, Discord, WhatsApp groups for community listening (but stay chill—nobody likes a lurker with "synergy" energy)

Success signals to watch for:

• Spikes in "direct" traffic to deep (non-homepage) pages

• Increase in high-quality referrals without clear attribution

• Organic mentions in closed groups or niche communities

• Customers literally telling you “someone sent me this”

BUT IF I CAN’T TRACK IT, DOES A TREE FALL IN THE FOREST? 🤷 

It’s a fair, reasonable mixed-metaphor question. After all, we’ve been hearing for the last 20 years that measurement is the lifeblood of modern marketing. 

But dark social laughs in the face of your attribution models—and not in a polite, British way. More like a full-blown Aussie snort-laugh.

The brutal truth: if you demand pixel-perfect attribution before investing in dark social strategies, you’ll end up optimising for the wrong game. You’ll chase easy-to-measure channels (that might convert worse) while ignoring the messy, wonderful human stuff that actually builds advocacy and trust.

Main criticisms you’ll hear:

• “We can’t see it, so we can’t justify spend.”

• “There’s no clear ROI from private sharing.”

• “It messes up our attribution models and MMM reports.”

And here’s why they’re partly right, but mostly wrong:

• No, you won’t track every dark social referral.

• No, you won’t be able to plug it neatly into your CAC spreadsheet.

• But if you’re serious about brand strength, organic growth, and real customer loyalty? Dark social isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the main event.

The most resilient brands in the world didn’t win because they perfectly optimised their paid search funnels. They won because they were trusted, talked about, and shared—privately, passionately, and often without the brand ever knowing it happened.

How to mitigate the pain:

• Embrace “Where did you hear about us?” surveys as a standard practice, not a cute bonus.

• Combine qualitative data (customer interviews, support chats, anecdotal wins) with pattern recognition (spikes in deep page direct traffic).

• Build brand tracking into your measurement stack: track awareness, consideration, and preference over time. Brand tracking doesn’t just capture dark social’s impact—it gives you a clearer view of all your marketing’s real-world effect, beyond clickthrough rates and channel reports.

• Set expectations early internally: dark social isn’t about perfect reporting, it’s about building brand gravity over time.

If you demand perfect tracking before you invest, your competitors will quietly eat your lunch in group chats, WhatsApp threads, and Slack channels you’ll never even see.

The best marketing has never been the loudest billboard or the slickest Facebook ad. It’s always been a whispered recommendation, a group chat link drop, a “trust me, you’ll love this” DM.

Dark social isn’t some terrifying new beast that needs taming.

It’s a mirror, reflecting what’s always been true: people trust people, not platforms.
And the brands that win? They’re the ones building things worth sharing—quietly, privately, passionately.

Recap your toolkit:

• Stop chasing public vanity metrics and start designing for private usefulness.

• Accept that not all value is measurable, but real growth leaves a trail you can follow if you look differently.

• Track brand health over time like your marketing life depends on it—because honestly, it does.

There are almost no brands in the world that people truly shout about (at least not in a positive way).

But almost every successful brand has legions of customers quietly whispering, chatting, and sharing about them—day after day, conversation after conversation, unseen but unstoppable.

So ask yourself:
If your best customers are talking about you in places you can’t see… Are you giving them something worth talking about?

If you enjoyed this edition, please forward it to a friend who’s looking to level-up their growth game - they’ll love you for it (and I will too) ⏭️ 💌

PS. When you’re ready here’s how I can help you:

1. Fractional CXO services: Need a top strategic product, marketing and digital transformation mind to grow your brand, but don’t want the hefty price tag? Fractional CXO services allow you to start growing revenue, before your grow your people costs. Limited slots available.

2. Events and Conference Host: Don’t get the guy who last week was MC’ing a carpet industry conference. If you’re in marketing, CX or digital I can help make your conference a memorable delight for your attendees.

Troy Muir | The Ladder