Think your Facebook is just for your personal rants or for posting 20 billion pictures of what you had for lunch that day?
Wrong.
In the past year, Facebook has teamed up with Datalogix to match facebook user profiles to consumer retail data, in order to better focus a company’s marketing efforts. That means that by liking “urban outfitters” on facebook, through the use of customer analytics, they are able to profile you as a “young, wannabe hipster”. This development has been used by numerous companies to gather data on their clients, and dances between the lines of ingenious and creepy.
Although Facebook claims that the exchange of information between them and datalogix is purely anonymous through the use of assigned IDs, there is still cause for concern that one is no longer in complete control of their identity. It’s akin to going on a blind date and having the other person know exactly everything about you. Disturbing? Yes. Wrong? Well, depends on whether we chalk it up to enthusiasm or misguided intentions. Either one, to say that you would be perfectly okay with this would not be true.
When it comes down to the wire, facebook analytics is a powerful tool in targeting your market segment. However, more importantly, is maintaining your customers loyalty and trust. The tradeoff between some information about your consumer’s living habits and a huge PR scandal that could forever damage your brand, might just not be worth it. Ethics in marketing should be viewed from the bottom (consumer’s perspective) up, in order to ensure wise decisions that could prevent a scandal in the future.
As for putting up every detail on your facebook page, please don’t. I don’t think my newsfeed and I care that you “made eggs for breakfast today”. It’s just protecting my sanity, and your privacy in the long run.
http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-is-tracking-what-you-buy-to-provide-marketers-better-ad-analytics-2012-09