Social networking feels free, but we pay for it in ways that may not be readily apparent. The rich personal data many of us enter into these networks is a treasure trove for marketers whose job it is to target us with ever-increasing precision.
A company called Colligent mines social networks for data that it sells to record labels to help them decide which demographics or individual fans might like a particular artist, and those are just the very first nuggets marketers pull out of profiles. It and other companies track everything we publicly do on social networks and crunch it into marketing data. The company recently began signing clients outside the music industry, so your next household detergent could be marketed to you based on your appreciation of vintage Mister Clean ads.
Never before have we voluntarily publicized so much of our personal data and consumption preferences, especially not in very structured ways that ease the work of marketer’s data scrapers (Compare Facebook’s categorized favorites listings to old Geocities free-for-all web designs). And most of it accurately reflects what’s going on in our actual lives, according to Sree Nagarajan, founder, president and CEO of Colligent, which gives marketers a way to hit us up in the offline world using information gleaned online.
“If you think about your Facebook profile,” said Nagarajan, “95 percent of what you describe there is not about your online life, even though it is online. You’re talking about your hobbies, you’re talking about your interests, your favorite TV show or your favorite band.” Social networking sites allow his company to measure content’s “stickiness” — not only what you watched, but how much you liked it based on your Facebook profile, YouTube video ratings, and so on.
Traditional ways of monitoring the media you consume remain important to marketers, says Nagarajan. But those methods can’t monitor our behavior when we might watch a show on television, a DVR, iTunes, YouTube, Hulu, or any other number of places. No matter where we watch something, we tend to express our preferences on public social networking sites, allowing marketers to unite our fractured media consumption habits once again — this time in far greater detail.
“Did they love the show so much that they are favoriting the shows on YouTube, saying Grey’s Anatomy is one of their favorite shows on their Facebook or MySpace page, or putting the theme song on their pages?” asked Nagarajan. “Being able to measure all the engagement levels of that entertainment by consumers is going to be the next generation of measurement.”
A company called Colligent mines social networks for data that it sells to record labels to help them decide which demographics or individual fans might like a particular artist, and those are just the very first nuggets marketers pull out of profiles. It and other companies track everything we publicly do on social networks and crunch it into marketing data. The company recently began signing clients outside the music industry, so your next household detergent could be marketed to you based on your appreciation of vintage Mister Clean ads.
Never before have we voluntarily publicized so much of our personal data and consumption preferences, especially not in very structured ways that ease the work of marketer’s data scrapers (Compare Facebook’s categorized favorites listings to old Geocities free-for-all web designs). And most of it accurately reflects what’s going on in our actual lives, according to Sree Nagarajan, founder, president and CEO of Colligent, which gives marketers a way to hit us up in the offline world using information gleaned online.
“If you think about your Facebook profile,” said Nagarajan, “95 percent of what you describe there is not about your online life, even though it is online. You’re talking about your hobbies, you’re talking about your interests, your favorite TV show or your favorite band.” Social networking sites allow his company to measure content’s “stickiness” — not only what you watched, but how much you liked it based on your Facebook profile, YouTube video ratings, and so on.
Traditional ways of monitoring the media you consume remain important to marketers, says Nagarajan. But those methods can’t monitor our behavior when we might watch a show on television, a DVR, iTunes, YouTube, Hulu, or any other number of places. No matter where we watch something, we tend to express our preferences on public social networking sites, allowing marketers to unite our fractured media consumption habits once again — this time in far greater detail.
“Did they love the show so much that they are favoriting the shows on YouTube, saying Grey’s Anatomy is one of their favorite shows on their Facebook or MySpace page, or putting the theme song on their pages?” asked Nagarajan. “Being able to measure all the engagement levels of that entertainment by consumers is going to be the next generation of measurement.”
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