Social Media View at the Intersection of Marketing & Privacy

Social Media View at the Intersection of Marketing & Privacy. Online Expert Lee Gientke contributes his thoughts on this complicated issue.

One of the things that the internet has been able to do is reduce or in some cases eliminate any upfront cost for a consumer to utilize a service. Just think about how awesome and value additive Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and a zillion other websites are!

And the best part of it is that despite the huge cost of providing these services, most consumers think they pay nothing to use them. Notice, I said almost nothing. The true cost is the elimination of real privacy. These companies know more about you than you know about you just by your online habits and with persistent cookies, they are tracking every move you make online.

From a marketer’s perspective, until recently, they’ve only known you as a number and as a member of a meme, which is valuable but the holy grail is knowing you as Peter Klinge or Lee Gientke so they can show you highly relevant ads based on your past and present usage. The best story I’ve seen recently is how Target was able to figure out a woman was pregnant before she told anyone else yet they were able to deliver coupons for prenatal stuff so she would get in the habit of shopping at target for the really valuable things like diapers and other post natal stuff. The original article is re: shopping habits is here.

The things a consumer and business should know are:

1) Privacy online doesn’t exist any more — period. Any misbehavior or deviance is recorded for anyone to access if you are the right person so don’t be doing anything that might make your mom blush.

2) The only method to protect your data is to not go online. Most marketers and large companies like Google use persistent cookies that track your every move online. Their privacy policies clearly state they are all recording your moves and what they do with your data is none of your business. The only way to not be tracked is to not use that service, which is increasingly hard. Imagine a day without using Google?

 3) Paid services won’t fly because of the scale necessary. Think about Facebook for a moment. The only reason Facebook works is because everyone is on it and using it. Imagine a social network without anyone on it – that’s what Facebook would be if they charged even a small fee. They also know that the data they have is more valuable than any fee they’d ever be able to collect. I’m sure someone has done some of the research and published it but talking about what each user is worth to Facebook on an annual basis would be an interesting fact. I think for Google it was in the hundreds of dollars…

For more on this topic go to Why Do You Need to Worry About Social Media Privacy…? by Peter Klinge

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