As many people probably know, Facebook has been hammered recently by concerns over user information and privacy. It’s disconcerting stuff.

I’ve just logged in and changed pretty much all of my privacy settings to make sure my information doesn’t end up in the hands of some distance third party of a third party who accessed it because someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years was my friend on Facebook.

Not that that can happen now, but it seems like a reasonable extension of where Mr Zuckerberg and friends are taking their social behemoth.

I’m not against Facebook, not against using the platform or the services.  But I am against someone using my personal data in the context of my ’social graph’ for their own financial ends and disguising it as a business plan.

Facebook can’t make sufficient money for its user base because it’s fundamentally not a business. WPP’s chairman Martin Sorrell recently made a statement to this effect, that ‘Social Media is more a personal phenomenon than a business one’. Joseph Jaffe criticized Sorrell on his blog for saying this, but I think missed the core intent of the comment - there is no inherent value in being a medium for social connection.

I think Sorrell was making a statement about the viability of Facebook as a business more than he was commenting on the viability of using Facebook to run/market a business. These are two very different things. If I create a network of people using some fancy new technology, the value of those connections is held and realized by the individuals in the network and the savvy individuals/businesses that can utilize the network for their own means.

It’s not realized by the guy sitting on all the fancy technology used to connect the network in the first place.

Facebook is not worth some squared sum of the connections it facilitates. Up to now, it’s basically worth whatever advertisers want to pay to interrupt people writing daily updates on their virtual walls or playing with their virtual farms.

This being not enough, it now has its sights on using personal data to ‘augment the internet experience’. No thanks. I like your platform, like that it connects me to people I care about, but I can’t give you permission to use my personal information to build a business from. It’s not yours. It’s mine. I don’t care necessarily how private it is (it’s on the web after all, right?), but it’s not a way for you to make money.

This is the essence of the debate to me. It’s not about privacy, it’s about permission. The bargain was that you can bombard me with ads, services, third-party offers, it wasn’t that you could take my social data and use it to make money for yourself.

I can’t wait to see what 4 guys working night and day on only pizza and beer in NY can create!

I stumbled across a post the other day by Scott Brinker, the President and CTO of ioninteractive.

Scott writes a really interesting blog call Chief Marketing Technologist - words that don’t typically, or haven’t typically, shared the same sentence.

He talks about ‘the most important choice’ in online marketing - between the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience.  He means you have to choose how granular your marketing efforts are.  Do you slice your audience up into tiny segments, each with some unique characteristic, and serve them a tailored message?  Or do you stick to one or two segments and deliver a far less fragmented communication?

The first comment I would make, and with all due respect to Scott, is that I don’t think you need to trade off the unity of your brand.  Brands are multidimensional to begin with.  Whether you like to use Brand Onions, Layers, Pillars, etc.  to conceptualize it, your brand is made up of a core belief and around that (or under it or above it) different manifestations of that belief (values, feelings, attributes).  

I think Scott is talking more about the effort you need to go to as an online Marketer to segment your communication efforts by targeting a few groups or a few hundred!  You don’t necessarily need to trade off your brand unity for this, nor should you, you just need to find manifestations of your brand’s core idea that work for these segments.

But before you even go down this road, I think there is another very important strategic choice - whether or not an individual in your market is made up of multiple segments themselves!

I was recently doing some work for a major national restaurant chain.  They had a traditional segmentation that divided the entire market into five or six groups.  Typical groups you would think of - the family oriented crowd, the sports bar crowd, etc.  The problem was that while these groups represented a dominant attitude for an individual, it was only one of many.  We discovered the ’sports bar’ enthusiast was eating out with his family on the weekend in a quiet and relaxed setting.  His ’sportiness’ was still there, it had just been overshadowed by a different set of needs - relaxing, quiet, family time.  Talking to the ’sports guy’ only about bar food and alcohol missed an entire other opportunity - family get-togethers.  One that happend to represent a GREATER proportion of his wallet.

I think there are lessons here for online marketers.  Especially because online tools are easily deployed for different needs.

Take Gmail for instance.  I use it both for work and personal email, but I use it slightly more for work.  If Google segmented me into a ‘work’ group it would miss an opportunity to sell me on personal tools.

it sounds simple when you put it like that. But most marketers shy away from defining their audience along overlapping need lines.  You are typically either in one segment or another, not both!

I’m not too sure how this idea changes Scott’s original representation of the trade-off.  In some ways it might make it easier.  Instead of focusing on the quirkiness of individuals, who all have traits that make them different, you just need to find out all the ways your product/service is being used/deployed. Consolidate your communications efforts around these different needs and allow individuals to float in and out.

The strategic question then becomes static segments versus dynamic need states?  

Who ever said marketing wasn’t complicated?

I downloaded and installed Chrome the other day. Chrome is the new Google browser.

I’m not going to talk at length or postulate on the strategy behind Google releasing a browser - this has been covered on many other blogs. What I am going to mention is how you release a piece of software with a personality - a Brand Personality - built into it.

Google is a master of this. Microsoft is terrible. Various other software vendors fall in between these two extremes. Apple is a genius at it, although in a very different way.

Here are some examples of Google’s Brand Personality creeping into the Chrome product…

1. When you click on the Task Manager in the Developer section there is a small button that lets you see some more detailed information. Typically this is generally called ‘more information’. Or, ‘more data’. Or something very Microsofty, ‘Additional technical information’.

In Chrome, its…

2. When you open the ‘incognito’ window (the one that allows you to surf as a spy - ok, you’re not actually a spy, it just doesn’t let other people spy on you), there is a list of things that going ‘incognito’ doesn’t protect you against.  This list is important as it’s about security and security is a serious issue.  Look at the last two entries…

3. When you choose the Options item from the main menu, a new window appears with some options in it.  There are three tabs.  Usually these tabs are broken down by functionality - maybe a ‘General’ tab, a ‘Security’ tab etc.  In Chrome it’s…

4.  When you try and uninstall most software products it’s a pretty dull, unemotional affair.  You click through the uninstall procedure and hope that the annoying software goes away.  Chrome is easy to uninstall, but it’s the first software product that’s genuinely polite about it…

These are small things but they speak volumes about the personality of the product and company you are dealing with.  You don’t have to like them - not everyone will.  But at least they stand for SOMETHING.

The difference between companies that inject a bit of their own personality into their products and those that don’t…. is courage.

And that also speaks volumes.