Do Not Track — Or, At Least Pretend You’re Not Tracking

Photo credit to Zach Klein.

The other day I sat in on a webinar about using social media data in marketing.  The webinar was fascinating – and the accompanying Twitter discussion was even better.  Towards the end of the conversation, one of the presenters made the point that marketers need to give customers something in exchange for access to their data.  He named a few possible benefits to consumers, but they were all just dressed up forms of personalized advertising.  On Twitter, I commented that, “The problem is that the things you get in exchange for giving personal data are custom ads – valuable to the company, not you.” Then I sat back and watched the retweets roll in.