Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

I’ve been a number of conversations lately about data-mining and semantic search (or ‘discovery’ as one company’s CEO told me she preferred- not sure I know the difference…). In one of those exchanges I brought up the idea of tracking ‘habitual information’, a phrase I’ll take credit for originating (my five minutes of fame?). The idea struck me- there are many kinds of information I track on a habitual level: certain stock prices, weather, environmental economics, usability, etc. I am sure that there are many others who share a similar pattern of habitual information.

As a marketer I see behavioral targeting potential in this information. In a previous post I wrote about iGoogle as a potential source of behavioral data for Google. This idea of habitual information takes that model further. If you know my information habits, as opposed to simply tracking what I do while surfing, then you could target me more precisely when I do surf. So if go daily to Techcrunch, NYTimes Business section, Science Daily and have a Google Alert set for Apple Inc.,  I’m guessing there’s quite a few people like me out there. The ads served up on these sites collectively could target my interests.

I haven’t quite got my arms around how this might work but I’m guessing the data-miners at Google and the ad networks have got something like this on their radar- I’ll be watching for it.

“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.”
- Stephen Hawking

I think I respectfully disagree with Hawking about whether these ‘lifeforms’ are all malevolent. You could certainly argue that the algorithms and search index bots created by the Googles of the world are in fact very similar to viruses: They travel the web from link to link gathering as much information as possible and transmit that information back to a private company that profits from it. Is this technically different from a virus that travels to your hard drive and transmits your personal information back to someone whose intent is to profit from it? The intent is the same but the word ‘personal’ is where the difference lies. When you get personal you break the law.

There is a lot of debate among online marketers about the tracking of individual behavior on the web. Behavioral targeting and retargeting use your surfing history to assemble a profile of what you’re interested in and then use that profile to serve up ads that they think you will be interested in. These ads appear in sites you are expected to surf to. For advertisers these ‘targeted by intent and relevance’ ads are far more valuable than taking a shotgun approach to a campaign. So is your privacy being invaded? Are they related to malicious viruses? Again, no, because they only know your IP address, not your identity.

This is where the line is drawn in the sand in online marketing. As long as they can’t identify us personally these techniques should be legal. To use personal information we must have opted-in or given permission for that use. As regulators look at the world of personalized marketing online this should be the standard benchmark for defining the difference between legitimate targeted marketing tactics and spammy illegal attempts to acquire personal information without permission.

According to AppleInsider, Apple has filed patents for a comprehensive lifestyle management system that integrates software, sensors that monitor exercise activity and a user’s iPod or iPhone. The system would survey the user on a wide range of lifestyle data and create health and workout profiles that match the user’s goals. It would then use the portable device to cue the various workout routines and physical sensors would ‘tell’ the device how the user was responding to the workout.

The interesting thing about this is the way it integrates their software and hardware into their users’ lives. It is a natural extension of the current iPod/iPhone model where these devices become indispensable  to the user. As the tobacco and alcohol companies know, addiction is a very effective marketing tool. While I do not in any way want to imply any similarity between Apple and those companies, they do recognize the power of creating products that once a user gets used to having them, they become a necessary part of their life. This is ecosystem marketing- once you are hooked into the ecosystem of their products and services, you’re there for life and will continue to buy improvements and new services that work within that ecosystem.

If you manage domains and have been following the various discussions of recession-proofing your business then you have to get more advanced and start using the tools available now to develop richer visitor experiences.

We are obsessed with the idea that the future is building sites whose content is delivered automatically while maintaining relevance to the subject matter of the site and the intent of the readers. With APIs, RSS, Google News Feeds and your own original content, it’s possible to build out sites that are legitimate media sites without huge staffs and big budgets.

Jonathan Mendez, always worth a read, agrees:

“In the user controlled medium that is digital advertising success is predicated on delivering relevance. Nowhere is this exemplified better than the success of search where there is a data input (rule 1) and multiple additional rules (geo and behavioral) that results in the delivery of content believed to be most relevant to the goals of the user. There is no question that the race to gain access to more implicit and explicit input data from users and from publishers to create rules will continue to increase the ability for marketers to deliver relevance in the coming years.”

The days of static content and parked sites are numbered, IMHO. Domainers must get more technologically sophisticated and more content-aware. When companies like Oversee (covered ad nauseum in the domaining blogs, no link needed) raise $150 million it is a signal: the big players are coming in and they have big guns- and they’re going to use this money to create sophisticated automated media empires. That’s where this ship is headed.