personalisation

My usual caveat - not sure that this company will succeed - but somebody is going to take this idea and make it fly.

The modern world can be a dehumanizing place. Long gone is the sweet little old lady at the drugstore counter, replaced by big box retailers, brand logos and barcodes. We’re more often“handled” than serviced, calculated, rather than cared for.

As consumers, we have long left trails of data behind us. Our credit card firm has known what we spend money on where; and our mobile phone firm has known where we are whenever we have our phone with us. And both sets of data have been used by brands to personalise how they market to us, and the products and services they offer to us.

This is the 1,000th post to Marketo’s blog. It seems fitting to commemorate the occasion by revisiting our very first post, “Modern B2B Marketing Defined”, and commenting on what’s changed – and what hasn’t – since August 8, 2006.

I gave a keynote last week at the rather wonderful Google Squared programme on the subject of technological disruption and chose to dedicate my latest column in New Media Age to the subject:

Occasionally I come across a brand, an organisation, a bunch of people who get it, who practice it as opposed to talk about it. Who am I talking about? I am talking about giffgaff – a mobile virtual network operator that works off / is tied to the O2 network in the UK. giffgaff is unusual/innovative as a brand/organisation and I have written about giffgaff here and here. You should know that my family and I are members/customers of giffgaff.

Marketers are being offered unprecedented new capabilities to target consumers by interests and behavior. There’s growing evidence, though, that consumers are finding these personalized pitches off-putting. A new survey of UK social media users showed that nearly half “don’t like having ads targeted to them based on information included in their social media profiles, including activities, interests, and other personal data.”

The social graph is not a new thing. The concept has been spoken about since at least the 1960s and is simply a way of representing (drawing) all the connections between people. Imagine a small island community of three people with no links to the outside world; you could represent this community as a social graph – showing all three connected to each other.

Guest post by Frédéric Baffou

“The end of this afternoon is warmful and sunny. I am cruising with my new BMW on the sea side. I can enjoy the multiple options that I have configured to get the car built according to my needs. It is now 5.00 pm on my beautiful Quai de l’Ile watch from Vacheron Constantin. I played the role of a watchmaker as I could choose from 400 different possibilities directly on a touch screen.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

Yahoo's new limits on user data retention and Facebook's latest row over faux college groups illustrate the bizzaro-world conflict between too little and too much information in search, social media, and online life in general.