Fellow COMM101 student Alexander Qu quoted a fundamental axiom in one of his recent blog posts on BTM in social networking: “one of the axioms of social media has been: ‘If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.'”
Source: http://siliconangle.com/files/2013/10/Facebook-Tracking.jpg
But of course there was a catch. If I ran the business technology management (BTM) over at Facebook I’d do the same. With ‘leading competitor’ Google using Google Ads and Adsense, a lot of big data can be collected from the billions of personal computers surfing the web, making decisions. This overwhelmingly large amount of data can be used by firms for market analysis and to know more about consumer preferences, but the amount of uncertainty may be just as overwhelmingly large. Facebook’s new BTM strategy to track mouse movements should also consider these implications of uncertainty. The benefits from tracking mouse movements could provide insight into online consumer choices, methods of effective advertising, or many more quantifiable variables, but to sort out and control these variables will be difficult considering the equal or greater amount of uncertainty associated with each variable.