Is Internet Marketing Too Invasive?
You only need to walk through your local town centre to see the shops boarded up and companies who have been around for years closing their doors and facing bankruptcy due to the recession. However, the e-commerce industry and internet marketing industry is growing and growing but has it become too invasive?
There are no criticisms against internet marketing in that it hasn’t proved to be a helpful tool in aiding businesses to manage and revolutionise the way in which they connect to their customers.
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are having an effect on internet marketing activities and are allowing retailers and businesses online to interact with customers in real time as if they were in a brick and mortar store.
Most people take it for granted when a web design presents to a visitor items which they recommend or what may be related to what the user requires or enjoys. However is this helpful or simply invasive?
Already Twitter has announced that it had expanded its advertising programme for mobile website users and thus promoted trends and tweets would be included. But this internet marketing activity has been taken on step further when Twitter announced that there will be “tweet archives” stretching back as far as two years on each profile for market research purposes.
Twitter will sell these “tweet archives” to companies in order for them to target specific users but is this simply too invasive?
There have been many concerns that this infringes privacy rights and many users of the sight have become angry as the whole appealing idea of Twitter was that you could type your 140 character tweet send it and it was brief and immediate. No one expected that these tweets would be accessible by companies for marketing purposes.
Can you blame Twitter though? In reality one billion tweets are posted on Twitter every week on a global scale. The argument on the other side is that it cannot infringe copyright because the minute the user posts a tweet it is visible on a global scale anyway.
The new guidelines will be announced this year which will put websites in a position where they have to request permission from the computer user before a tracking cookie can be left on their computer. This has been implemented in the hope that remarketing, a device where if I type “cupcakes” into Google it will then target me each time I go on the internet with ads based on the websites I have clicked on and visited.
Brick technology wants to know your thoughts! Do you find this invasive or is it acceptable?