The line between personal and professional on social networks has been much discussed already, but a new angle (for me) arose over a coffee yesterday.
As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?
I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.
We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing. For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).
Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.
So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?
Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.
But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.
It’s a delight to see well-thought out and well-reasoned arguments being put forward about online marketing.
I should declare an interest here – I’m VP International for wunderloop, who offer behavioural and other forms of targeting, wrapped in the Connect ad exchange… so I’m not exactly impartial.
However, a dozen or so years in online marketing have shown that success of placing campaigns is rarely single-dimensional. In fact I’d tend to draw it as a compass, with the main axes pointing to geographic, timing (e.g. day and day part), socio-demographic and behaviour/interest based. In the centre of the compass I’d put context – because that is always a factor, regardless of the other targeting elements.
How much of a factor depends (at least in part) on the aims of the campaign – for example: is it the influence of brand associations or is it purely direct response?
Again, this is not a binary question – there are definite shades of grey.
Either way, what the industry is seeing – and accelerated by the current economic conditions – is a shift in buying patterns from premium to discretionary advertising inventory. This is a trend that was happening in any case, but which a softer buying market is accelerating.
Targeting (BT or otherwise) offers benefits on both sides of the media buying/selling equation: buyers can get better placed campaigns to drive whatever measurable benefits the campaign is aimed at; sellers can get a better price for the inventory they select by making sure that they put the right inventory into the mix for their customers.
And what do the audience get?
Content, in one shape or form or another – and mostly free of charge.
When I started in the online business a dozen or so years ago, my dad would always ask “yes, but who PAYS for it?” In the late ’90s, that was a rare question to ask.
Most forms of payment, other than ad-funding, have been gradually debunked: subscriptions models have not really taken off; micro-payments exist but don’t provide the currency to compensate for the development of web systems or creating content; fees from ISPs have been stripped away, packaged or reduced to commodity pricing. So ad-funding is (for most online content) an inevitability – as well as very competitive.
Which means that attempts to add value to discretionary inventory are here to stay too.
| 3.2 |
g.mail glitch
I learned a while back now that there is an issue with the use of dots at Gmail. This is a known issue that Google list on their help pages. I was quite relaxed about this as, to quote Google:
“If you’re homerjsimpson@gmail.com, no one owns Homer.J.Simpson@gmail.com, except for you.”
So far so good.
Until I started getting emails from someone in Australia about all kinds of stuff – mostly related to a university campus down there. And other emails from the US, where church organisations were sending me with all kinds of stuff about things they wanted me to participate in.
On checking with the two sets of emailers, turns out the difference has come from the presence (or absence) of dots in the email address. In both cases I’ve been told that the email addresses are otherwise the same.
So now I’m worried. If I am getting their mail, are they getting mine as well?
In the wake of various other privacy / data security glitches from Google, I think I need to find a new webmail server. Fast!
Is anyone else bothered that Google’s concern for the security and privacy is so low that private communications can be shared so easily?
| 3.2 |
Recent Comments