As a consumer, I have often always wondered every time I had cleared by cache on the laptop, who is accountable or responsible for dropping all the cookies that sit there without my knowledge or even with my "soft" implicit permission - a few of the websites or brands were tracking my behavior using 'app and codes' that sit on my PC. I just hate such intrusions on my privacy for the monetization benefits of somebody else. 

Finally, there seems to be first steps being taken in this direction. The key trade groups - IAB, AAAA, DMA, BBB, ANA announced self-regulation principles. How will they come into effect is critical, what measures are being taken to punish offenders will make a big difference for consumers like me trusting any information that I provide online. Here are some principles that they have adopted:

• The Education Principle calls for organizations to participate in efforts to educate individuals and businesses about online behavioral advertising. To this end, the digital media industry intends, in a major campaign that is expected to exceed 500 million online advertising impressions, to educate consumers about online behavioral advertising, the benefits of these practices and the means to exercise choice, over the next 18 months.
• The Transparency Principle calls for clearer and easily accessible disclosures to consumers about data collection and use practices associated with online behavioral advertising. It will result in new, enhanced notice on the page where data is collected through links embedded in or around advertisements, or on the Web page itself.
• The Consumer Control Principle provides consumers with an expanded ability to choose whether data is collected and used for online behavioral advertising purposes. This choice will be available through a link from the notice provided on the Web page where data is collected.
• The Consumer Control Principle requires “service providers”, a term that includes Internet access service providers and providers of desktop applications software such as Web browser “tool bars” to obtain the consent of users beforeengaging in online behavioral advertising, and take steps to de-identify the data used for such purposes.
• The Data Security Principle calls for organizations to provide reasonable security for, and limited retention of data, collected and used for online behavioral advertising purposes.
• The Material Changes Principle calls on organizations to obtain consent for any material change to their online behavioral advertising data collection and use policies and practices to data collected prior to such change.
• The Sensitive Data Principle recognizes that data collected from children and used for online behavioral advertising merits heightened protection, and requires parental consent for behavioral advertising to consumers known to be under 13 on child-directed Web sites. This Principle also provides heightened protections to certain health and financial data when attributable to a specific individual.
• The Accountability Principle calls for development of programs to further advance these Principles, including programs to monitor and report instances of uncorrected non-compliance with these Principles to appropriate government agencies. The CBBB and DMA have been asked and agreed to work cooperatively to establish accountability mechanisms under the Principles.

Download Ven-principles-07-01-09

Here's an interesting cool mobile app released by layar, a company based out of Netherlands.

Basically the app figures out exactly where you are and in which direction you're looking, and then it presents additional data overlaid on top of the camera's image. Be it a bank's ATM that you may want to reach or imagine you reach a locality in your city and would love to find some houses to live here, just use layar and it will find you some houses, real estate agent too and you can call him right away!

Watch it live here:

I do believe it has limitations. It's not all pervasive at it looks:

a. You need an android phone
b. The service needs to be available in your country.This to me is a serious limitation. In a country like
    India, which has a huge penetration of mobile phones, it will serve a real need. In a world of connected
    information that's almost seamless, one cannot be selective in making such a service available. To
    me it must be simple enough to be downloaded and used anywhere in the world. The data on the web
    must be leveraged. This is really where most services fail. You can't have a product on the net and
    expect it to be available only in Europe, US and Netherlands.
c. It still needs the consumer to do something to throw this data thro' this browser. The novelty factor
    may die after some time. It needs to be embedded with what the mobile phone consumer does. I am
    sure this will improve over time.

I do think  applications like these will redefine the way consumers, data providers and advertisers will collaborate in the future.

Best Buy recently launched Idea X - a platform for customers to comment, express and share their ideas to help Best Buy get more customer-centric.

I quite love the transparency and openness of Best Buy folks to admit that this is a learning phase which will evolve, for the better, over a period of time. Here's what they say about this initiative:

"We're new at this. Its probably going to be messy for awhile. We'll probably miss stuff. We'll probably screw up. But we'll learn and get better as fast as we can. We'll blog every two weeks with updates at first. Then we'll build in new and better ways to talk to you about your ideas - when we're reviewing them, or implementing them or when we decide we just can't do anything with them. We'll always be honest. We can promise we're all going to do our best. That means listening closely, talking openly about the ideas that you've shared. And trying our hardest to make it happen."

The most interesting comment regarding this, is of Barry Judge, CMO, Best Buy - " Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, once told me “the easier you make it for customers to complain, the better your product will become...These days, it’s easy to be more accessible. Truly, the only limitations are cultural. We are doing a lot of experiments in being more accessible. Our latest test, Best Buy IdeaXchange, is a web site that is intended to enable consumers (and employees) to give us feedback on what they would like to see us do to make Best Buy a better place to shop."

Results: Over the last 2 weeks, Best Buy seems to have received over 200 ideas!

My view

Engagement is the new branding. The more companies become accessible to customers, the more customers will trust them. Opening-up newer and newer channels is critical. It is important to behave openly and be able to let your customers know that as a company you are trying your best and there will be mistakes but you will definitely improve as you go along.

Remember, customers only punish indifference but they forgive mistakes.

Some questions you may want to ask yourselves to increase your Listening Quotient:

1. Are you as a company accessible to millions of your customers and do you have channel to start a dialog and hear them?
2. Do you as a company and management team have the maturity to listen to customer problems, new ideas and learn from them?
3. What's your company management team's Listening Quotient? Do you measure them?
4. How do you convert the Listening Quotient into top priority for action across the company? 
5. Is there one member of your company's various departments in charge of taking action on these priority areas?

Here are some interesting facts contained in the report:

How is semantic web a game changer for data integration?

The disparate data feed into a mashup—a Web application with highly configurable data display capabilities—that updates each time you add a new store site or remove an old one. Other data in the mashup arerefreshed whenever the original sources are updated. By combining various data, regardless of their formator source, you have a wide range of possibilities forgreater insight and context.

The challenges with traditional data integration vs semantic web:

Generally enterprises don't make the best use of their data.

Given the disparate systems and multitude of vintage of technologies( old and new), it is always very difficult for business managers to use multiple source of data for decisions.

Getting internal and external to handshake with each other can help trigger power decisioning within organizations

.....empower your business users...

with exploration tools that they could use with existing internal data and with external data of their choosing. These tools would let them find the best business cases and make immediate use of the Linked Data technologies at a low cost to IT, since most of these tools are reasonably priced.

Read more

Here's a great presentation by Alain Thys on how the world of marketing is changing and there is a very little time left to change or adapt or  just get extinct.

It's always interesting to see how marketers struggle to gain the attention of customers. Even after spending big bucks on marketing/promotions, some products catch the attention and some don't . This led me to think what makes customers lap-up certain product concepts even if they don't buy it the first time but how does one create a buzz that goes around it which enables others to make their decision faster. Here's an interesting perspective on the same topic:

If you want people to talk about your product or service, you need to ratchet up one of these three traits. Consider a 360-year-old Finnish company named Fiskars, which makes orange-handled scissors. If ever there was a viral-marketing challenge, it's scissors -- a product with all the sizzle of a RAM upgrade. Brains on Fire, a brand-identity firm based in South Carolina, helped Fiskars find the emotion. "We knew we had to move from a product conversation to a passion conversation," said Spike Jones, the firm's "firestarter." Jones and his colleagues realized there was one community that was indeed passionate about scissors: arts and crafters. They found four arts-and-crafts zealots and christened them "Fiskateers." Then Brains on Fire asked the Fiskateers to select additional compadres who would support other people in their crafting hobby. (Notice the added public-service element.) Since the project launched, there has been a 600% increase in online mentions of the Fiskars brand. (I had covered this in my previous blog post)

Start thinking about emotion, public service, and triggers.

Step # 1: People are emotional. If you can get them to either agree/disagree, love/hate, join/oppose your messages they tend to get involved. Your marketing efforts need to appeal to them to do that. Also, you need a method to know your believers and disbelievers by name and contact - a database. Then, build a one-to-one dialog with them.

Step # 2: People want to contribute Remember, people always want to give back something to the community. When you let them know you are the catalyst for the same, they tend to align with your products or brands. Include that in your marketing efforts, they tend to feel good and talk about their contribution to others and hence about your product or brand.

Step # 3 People want the right triggers  Not always, everybody wants to do the talking. But they definitely do so when there is a trigger. For example, green and energy efficiency, acts as triggers to get people to talk to each other about their contribution to this environment by buying products that are energy efficient. Or getting somebody to use or try your product before others( a preview) or a test your product before the launch encourages chatter as a trigger.

If you don't treat customers as " transactional" elements of your marketing efforts but as "emotional" absorbers of your messages, it can work a long way in gaining a passionate dialog about your products/brands leading to higher conversion and market share.

Imagine a time when you were busy taking the help of somebody to do mind reading, handwriting analysis etc. which would tell you more about the kind of person you are or the person who you are going to meet, - to know what your or their strengths and weaknesses! Or doing a detailed profiling research to know more about your customers' demographics and psychographics.

Here, it's happening to the online world too but with a difference. With typeanalyzer,  you can know the person a lot better( - What personality is your blog?)! Here's an analysis of my blog!

INTJ - The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Looks like this is will be one of the many ways by which customers on the web will be profiled!  Hence, this could become one of the ways to target or pull them to products or services basis their interests and personality!