Tracking Voters’ Clicks Online to Try to Sway Them

Thomas Goddan, a community college student and a devoted supporter of President Obama, clicked on Mitt Romney's website in order to check for the candidate's position on abortion. After that, he visited other websites as normal; he started to see the ads asking him to donate to Romney's campaign.

He is Present Obama's supporter. However, after he opened Romney's site, Romney's ads have been following him.

This campaign is the use of sophisticated data-mining technique to customise ads for voters based on the digital trails they leave.

The benefit of these trackers will raise the risk that information about people's political beliefs will spread to many of business-to-business companies. The trackers may later use those voters' information  for inappropriate purposes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/us/politics/tracking-clicks-online-to-try-to-sway-voters.html?pagewanted=all

Facebook Personalization and Privacy Issues

Nowadays people get in touch with each other easily by social media like Facebook which seem to be the most popular social network that people have been using. The good thing to have this kind of social network is that people can get in touch and update their life for their friends to see on what ever things they like. But this of course doesn't just only going to have only the good things that happen it also have a negative side of it too. For example from this Article their is one man who said,

"Facebook is so greedy and has no more respect for its members privacy somehow allows hackers or third parties to use my e-mail to soliciting to my contacts, making them believe that I was trying to contact them with a message. Thanks facebook you just became one of the bad guys. Thats crazy i cant even tell you how many time i had to change my password cause someone hack into it." 

This shows that by posting your personalization data onto this kind of Social Network is not a good idea people can get access to them easily even though you did not allow other people to do so rather than your friends. Their are a lot of hacker out there who might want your data for what ever purpose. So this have become some of the personalization and privacy issues with the social network. Is it a good idea to give out information like this through Internet base.

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/05/11/analysis-some-facebook-privacy-issues-are-real-some-are-not/

Graduate student uncovered online privacy violations missed by FTC

Google preaches "Do not be evil" but in attempt to know customers' searching habits better practices privacy violation.


Jonathan Mayer, a fellow at Stanford Center for Internet and Society, found that the leader of search engine business Google was planting tracking codes in the users iPhone's web browser. 

As to me I do not mind Google's tracking my searching habits, but the fact they violated their own credo makes me feel disappointed. What about you? 

The revelation of Amazon Associates' Affiliate Marketing

It is so surprising that Amazon began its Affiliate Marketing in 1996, when e-commerce even not had a large scale. 

Especially recent years, Affiliate Marketing enjoys more the advantage of  economies of scale of e-business. For the merchant, this "Performance-based-Marketing" model means they only need to pay when they really get revenue; For the affiliates, as long as there are enough visitors to their website, they can make money even if they have no products to sell; For networks like Amazon, it can access to thousands of people with a rather low cost as well as improve its awareness, not only to the products be linked by affiliates, but also million products as long as visitors get access to it through the affiliates.

Unlike cost-per-click or other kinds of impression based e-marketing, Affiliate Marketing makes good use of the great scale advantage of Internet from another aspect of consideration: not rely too much on SEM, but pay more attention to social media on the basis of mutual benefit.

Ordering Pizza in the Future (Privacy Issue)

Can you imagine if we are talking about the technology recently, how will it evolve in the future? How this will affect our daily life. We are very pleased if people know what we like to eat and what we love to do before we ask them, but when they start knowing more that we expect they should know. It becomes annoying and I ensure that we will miss the old way.

Human being is human being. We cannot go too far beyond our expectation. Here is a video that explained a concern in the future with personalization and privacy issues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNJl9EEcsoE

Bestbuy withdrawed from China

In my mind, bestbuy is always the popular electric appliance giants in the retail market. I have been to their three big stores in Shanghai many times. Their stores are always big and wide, you could spend a whole day to look around there, but before I came to Japan, occasionally found, their stores were closed already. After I checked that out, I learned its withdraw from China, this must be another big news for the big failure case following Ebay in China. Problems may exist in their marketing  plans, every time I went there just checking the devices and took a try, I would never buy it, probably the other customers they would do the same, they just attracted our attention but failed to make us taking action. I think we could check this out as a good marketing lesson.

Does SNS bring the big problem to a company?

        Recently, many company presidents use SNS, and take communication with consumers directly. It is famous that SOFTBANK President Son and RAKUTEN President Mikitani are using Twitter. Mr. Son has received many request to improvement of service though Twitter from many consumers, and he sometimes accept them.

        The other day, START TODAY which operates the "ZOZO TOWN" of the e-commerce site, President Maezawa got angry to the comment from a customer, and he responded it in severe language like “You don’t buy anything our site from now!!!” The claim is that mailing cost is quite expensive. Since the problem became serious after all, Mr. Maezawa apologized to the customer and all consumers. Finally, their mailing cost became free from November 1st. In the meantime, on the network, many comments are critical for Mr. Maezawa, and site image of ZOZO TOWN became lower.

        Company president can take communication directly with consumers by using SNS, it also has a merit, but if not cautious of an utterance, it may become loss of company.


"You must not order anything again on our website!!!"　　　　　　　↓ Next day "I'm sorry."