I smell a Pulitzer in the Wall Street Journal's recent coverage of digital media marketing techniques, "What They Know", a series on how marketers are "scraping" data about consumers from our browsing history, our membership of social media sites and our purchasing history, and in some cases selling that data commercially or to politicians so that we can be more effectively targeted. It should be required reading for anyone who ever opens a browser, and certainly it has interesting things to say about child safety, and tracking that takes place on sites for kids such as Club Penguin and Barbie.com (parents, click here).The problem is, that (even if you've not read any of the articles in the series), you kinda knew this was happening anyway.
Anyone who has a Gmail account already knows that the ads they view are determined by the words they type into their e-mails. Ditto Facebook, which spent the last ten months offering me ads for wedding dresses and bridal planners, doubtless based on my regular updates about our events. I just checked what they are currently pushing (Volkswagen Jetta for me - although obviously, that will differ vastly for the rest of you folks) - and I'm not sure if that is because one of my friends "Liked" the Jetta, or because somewhere in the data mining they've done on me, they've found a reference to Lucky, my fabulous Volkswagen Beetle.
So what does it all mean? The purpose of this post is not to encourage bunkerism, or suggest that a return to good old-fashioned paper and pen would be a good idea. It's more to encourage friends and family (and the few hundred others who apparently read this blog occasionally) to get smart. I've been dismayed recently by some of the posts from folks I respect that have appeared on Facebook or Linked In. People I used to work with have posted pretty lurid details of running up bar tabs on work junkets that finished at 6am, only to go to work again at eight. How can they be so reckless? Never mind the ethics of whether that's how you should be spending your company's dollar...Do they really think that no-one connected to the company will see these posts? Have they forgotten how many current, ex and future colleagues could be reading this? Unfortunately for them, your online imprint is pretty much like an elephant. It never forgets. Earlier this year, HuffPo collated 13 incidents of folks who had gotten fired over their Facebook posts. That's probably a drop in the bucket. It happens.
I think part of the problem is the desire to present an interesting persona online. But while most of us want to avoid being the boring Doreens who post such zingers as "Went to Starbucks today" or "I hate Mondays", we also need to find a healthy balance that avoids deeply racy or potentially compromising posts, just to impress our mates. Think about that audience. I'm friends with folks online with whom I haven't communicated in months, or in some cases, years. There's only so much that they need to know about me.
Of course, for me, this is a particularly thorny issue, because as a marketer, I would be delighted to have access to this kind of rich data. Targeting likely purchasers is the holy grail of marketing, and it has become ever more achievable in our new, information rich, world. But respecting customers is also a basic axiom of good marketing practice. It's just not clear how many companies are really practicing that respect as they chase their next quarterly earnings goal.
