Part of a short series on privacy
1. Is Your Privacy In Jeopardy?
2. The Mistaken Expectation of Privacy
3. Do We Need Internet Regulation?
4. Who Is Watching You? How And Why?

Beginning tomorrow, March 1, 2012, Google will be combining privacy policies across most of their products. This has led to alarmist commentary about how to “erase your history” before this supposedly disastrous, invasive event.

• Here we have PCWORLD telling you how to “take steps to prevent” yourself from “surrendering a lot more personal information to the GooglePlex”. They provide tips to “limit what Google can find out about you”. For some reason PCWorld thinks Google now magically has the ability to collect more information about you then they previously could by changing privacy policies.
• They also provide helpful information on “how to stay off the grid”. They seem to think you can be off the grid while being… on the grid.
• Over here we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation telling you how to delete your history before this event. Essentially they are saying search data is uniquely informational and should not be used during other web interactions. This is an interesting point to consider: we are entering new territory here in that Google owns many properties outside of search. This may not be obvious to the average user and creates unprecedented possibilities of services. Is this a terrible thing? Google already knows about you through search. No new data is being collected and Google’s policy states that they do not sell your data to third parties.
• Here CTV suggests Google “will be able to access a user’s personal interests, health problems, age and gender with the single policy” as if they are not able to do this already. They already do this! Google already captures this data during your online interaction with Google products. The only development here is that another Google product (for example YouTube) can access your search history and vice verse.

It is clear people are uncomfortable with the concepts of someone collecting and using data about your online activity. But these points of view are misunderstanding both how the Internet works and what exactly everyone’s relationship with Google means. Let’s examine the second part first.

Google is not spying on you, nor does Google have a motivation to invade your privacy. Google’s motivation is purely service oriented. They are attempting to help connect you with what you want. That is the service they are selling you. They would rather show you an ad that is relevant to you than one that is not. They can only do this by storing a history of your preferences. If this idea bothers you then you can log out of Google and avoid using their products.

In fact, Google is utterly transparent about how they view you and what they think you are interested in. If you are signed into Google, you can actually contribute to their understanding of you. When in history has a company ever been so transparent about what they think about you? When have they provided you with this unique ability to participate directly in the relationship? And Google projects like Data Liberation both categorize data collected and allow you to take the data stored about you.

But even if you avoid Google, you cannot expect to have a truly private interaction with the Internet. The Internet is a public space. Essentially every thing you do online is a public event and there is very little you can do about this. Certain companies *have* offered alternatives to Google’s search service, like DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo prevent “search leakage” as they call it by preventing websites from seeing referral data and by policy state that they don’t save and make use of your historical interactions with their site. This is a good service to offer, but in my opinion they will never be as good at search as Google is for this very same reason. Google’s personalized search has much more potential to be helpful to you because it knows about you, what you like, and what you mean when you query. In this sense, if you want to be secretive about something, use DuckDuckGo. But know this: you are still not really private.

The next post will take a step back and look at how the Internet actually works and why I think an expectation of privacy on the Internet is flawed.

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I had a great conversation with Jeff Martin from 360cities yesterday about marketers being “evil scumbags”. And I agree there’s a good reason to harbor anger toward advertising and marketing: in most cases, marketers are trying as hard as they can to first get your attention and second part you from your money. This immediately sets up an aggravating dynamic that must be overcome.

In light of this, it surprises me how people love to celebrate super bowl commercials. Or willingly show each other GEICO ads and forward ads to each other through email. How is it possible that some how, some way, these supposedly detested people have somehow made a sales pitch into an enjoyable event?

Ads these days are like short comedy shows/sketches, and the line between large budget advertising and pure entertainment is blurring more and more. If you think about how most online ad-driven revenue models work, it’s generally either to preroll an ad before allowing access to content or some kind of impression-based display marketing where ads are shown alongside the content. And ad placement, both stealthy and celebratory is commonplace in entertainment.

Each stage of the evolution of marketing has been manipulated by various factors. In a era of simple trade, marketing was marked by direct interaction, tenuous accountability and very small scale. You had to stand face to face with your buyer and convince them you had great value quickly. This led to snake oil sales and other such confidence tricks. With mass production and then various media playing roles in society, marketing became very indirect, more accountable and large scale. The way I see it for the consumer this was a step sideways. The benefits of broadcast marketing led to more information, but now the consumer had no way to directly respond to the product. There was no direct feedback loop other than long sales cycles and response data was both indirect and difficult to apply.

When we finally started having ratings on TV and consumer advocacy groups like consumer reports we could start to measure customer satisfaction and increase some accountability.

Today of course we have more data than we can consume easily. Entire businesses are dedicated to harvesting this data and giving you visibility into spend-profit ratios, customer response rates and how to balance spend along different channels. This, coinciding with social media is not only changing marketing, but *changing the kinds of people involved in marketing*.

As I said before, adding in the broadcast medium removed the direct quality of the producer-customer relationship. How would it be possible to engage so many people on the same scale as production? Thanks to social media and other online services, customers are finding ways to get the producer’s attention, interacting with them, and getting a chance to broadcast their feedback back out to the world with the same power as the producers have traditionally had.

In the world of one-way conversations like radio and television, manipulation, slickness and style are tantamount. Marketing *has* to be a show and therefore needs actors. But, in the *two-way conversation* accountability and directness are brought to the forefront at the large scale. Consumers have many new ways they can now join the marketing conversation. And who would willingly engage with a slick, “evil scumbag” in a two-way conversation? Style and show without substance mean very little on twitter.

In this next marketing evolution I believe we’ll see at least some shifting away from advertising/marketing content that has little to do with the product other than attempting to make us laugh or feel good or simply just get our attention. That is because the new marketer must have two qualities that were never necessary before: the ability to manage large amounts data and a great product that can they can stand next to proudly for all the world to see.

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A while back at a previous job I ran into an interesting problem. The marketing team was in disagreement about the overall effect of outbound links to the business. On the one hand is the basic notion that an outbound link is a way to send someone away from your site – seemingly not business-friendly. On the other hand attempting to wall in your traffic could be viewed as not very customer-friendly.

In our case, we were acting like brokers, offering quality and price comparison for the same service offered by many different companies. I wanted to put outbound links on our company detail pages to those companies, thinking it would do several things:

• Help consumers learn more about the company – a customer-friendly aspect of the site that would leave the customer feeling like they had a good experience
• Create a measure of trust between our company and the consumers – linking directly to their website would demonstrate a measure of confidence in our product pricing
• Establish a visible, online relationship between us and these companies – make Google and other search engines aware of these relationships and reinforce what our site is all about

The counter argument was that we were essentially sending our customers away to these companies where they might buy direct. We would lose the brokerage. We tossed around the idea of working out credit arrangements with our partners for traffic referrals, but we had so many companies each contract might vary and the solution seemed expensive to both hammer out and maintain.

There was also concern about a loss of paid traffic. Customers acquired through paid marketing channels might leave the site, and this was viewed as a real loss. I always found this position interesting. The upfront cost of acquisition through this channel somehow diminished the value of the “unpaid” channel. The implication, whether intentional or not, was that it was OK to lose organic search traffic but not paid search traffic.

To solve the knot, we conducted A/B/C testing on our navigation and links. Test A allowed the user to go nowhere but through our funnel. Test B allowed users to navigate throughout our site. Test C had outbound links to our partners. And without even measuring the effect on organic search ranking we found that users who were allowed to freely navigate not only converted better but bought other products on our site. Test A was in fact failing to advertise the rest of our site. Test B and C fared equally, suggesting no danger in outbound linking.

If we stop fearing the dangers of outbound links we are free to look at other benefits like how it affects SEO. SEOMOZ did a good whiteboard on this last July. And Matt Cutts talks about how PageRank flows in this blog post of his from last June.

Aside from these points of view, if you think about how a search engine spider might understand what a site is all about, imagine your site as a person with reputation. What you recommend says a great deal about your tastes. The web never makes sense in the context of websites in isolation. The nature of the web is relationships. And the best sites make great relationship recommendations to both the users and the search engines.

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I haven’t posted in a while and I am very late to the conversation on this topic but I wanted to add my two cents to the discussion over the value of social media expertise.

The latest version of the conversation started last May with a rather angry post about the uselessness of a social media expertise by Peter Shankman. Rand Fishkin had a good reply that does a good job presenting a different point of view. I tend to agree with Rand, both in this case and most of the time, but I’d like to add another dimension to the discussion.

Marketing and promotions are, and have always been, very social concepts. Being able to connect with people and explain your value requires a certain ability to hold conversations and get people to listen. And of course I don’t think Peter Shankman would deny this. I think he is expressing frustration over the fact that some people just want to use Facebook but don’t really know how.

But there ARE people who know how to use Facebook. And Twitter. And other forms of social media. And they legitimately know how to use it BETTER than others. Knowing how often to tweet, what’s the right time of day, what message will resonate with which audience. These types of things are actually measurable aspects of talent. A true skill that can be used to generate revenue.

It may be that being social (and through social media) is somewhat of a natural skill. If so, it is a talent that cannot necessarily be taught. This is opposition to the concept of a business model or a value proposition which can easily be learned. In this light, having the social media expert is not only a good idea, it’s potentially required if you want to survive against competition in an online marketplace. First you hire the guy that knows how to promote and engage online. Then you teach them your business.

Of course it’s not that easy. How does one identify a social media expert? If I am looking to hire someone to help with online marketing, I am asking interview questions about their social media prowess: how many personal followers do you have? How have you grown social footprints for your businesses? Where do see Google + fitting in? Etc…

Here’s an interesting experiment to grow your business: make a post to reddit asking all karma whores if they want a job in marketing for your company and weed through the responses. These guys are literally experts at getting people to listen to them. Maybe they won’t mind getting paid to do so?

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