As an online marketer, I tend to be more amazed than creeped out by what can be done with the mountains of data generated by web users every day. And even as a user, I am generally ok with being tracked to bits by marketers and websites. The way I see it is, I am going to see an ad anyways, so it may as well be an ad that is targeted to my interests. I mean, imagine if every commercial you saw on television, was ONLY about the things you bought and liked? It would be awesome.

But lately, some of our favorite politicians out there have realized that drafting legislation around this “privacy issue” is just the type of fight that can curry favor with average Joe voter. Take one part scary scenario (THE INTERNET BAD GUYS ARE WATCHING YOU), one part headline grabbing company (FACEBOOK or GOOGLE), and one part we’re-here-to-save-the-day (THE GOVERNMENT IS HERE TO RESCUE YOU!), and you’ve got yourself a bill that everyone loves. John Kerry and John McCain know that if they can draft up some really vague, uninformed, knee-jerk legislation that sufficiently sounds like it will stop all of the scary boogeyman scenarios that they’ve trumped up, voters will love it.

To hell with whether it actually does anything substantive, that’s not the point.

Anyhow, what irks me in all of this, is how poor a job the online marketing industry is doing here to counter this paranoia, and really re-frame the discussion with some…um…I don’t know, FACTS? How about highlighting what really is going on in the world of tracking and privacy, and discussing what is tracked, generally how anonymous it is, and how this tracking really improves those web experiences that we’ve all come to take for granted?

An article in Slate last week, really did a nice job of explaining this whole situation in less than scary terms.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of data that Web companies keep on us—personally identifiable information (like your name and list of friends), and information that can’t be tied to you as an individual. In our discussions about privacy, we rarely make this important distinction. While we focus on the disadvantages of companies collecting our information, we rarely look at the innovations that wouldn’t be possible without our personal data. This is especially true when it comes to anonymous data—information that can’t be used to identify you, but which serves as the building blocks of amazing things.

The entire thing is here, and it’s worth a read.

I guess if I had to make a prediction here, it’s that there will be some sort of goofy legislation passed, Kerry and McCain will get some political high-fives, and then the online/tracking/marketing industry will just make adjustments and find a new way to do what they were already doing. Problem not really solved…but problem not really problem to begin with right?

I mean, does anyone remember CAN-SPAM back in 2003? How’d that work out? Spam eradicated, right? Yah, that’s what I thought. CAN-SPAM just gave the spammers a nice rule book to work around, and allowed them to go about their spamming business as usual. Why do we think this situation will play out any differently?

And lastly, do people not realize that far more personal data (social security numbers, purchase history and spending habits, credit information, etc) have all been out there to be bought and sold now for years? Why aren’t we all up in arms about that? Long before the internet, our good friends at places like Experian and Acxiom have been tracking way more than Facebook, and selling real personal information to anyone with a nickel to spend.

Run some queries here, and then let’s talk about how scary it is or isn’t that Zappos shows you an ad because you looked at some sneakers.

If you are even a casual user of Twitter, I am sure you have seen the social media expert more than a few times. The profile looks something like this: Following 20,545, Followed by 20,100, and 10,000+ Tweets. This user’s tweet stream is populated by a steady stream of retweets and tweets of well-publicized articles from publishers like Techcrunch, Scoble, GigaOm, etc.

I’ve always hated people like this, but could never clearly articulate why it was that they bothered me so much. They always gave the appearance of adding value, but in the truest sense, they just weren’t. And today, Quora’s blog dropped a fantastic post that just plain nails it.

These people are called “reputation arbitrageurs”. And they (Quora) are exactly right.

The reputation arbitrageur then hopes by tweeting and retweeting sources with strong reputations, users will read these tweets, associate the source with the reputation arbitrageur and quite possibly even retweet the link. With each tweet, the reputation arbitrageur manages to claim a small piece of credibility from what is essentially a costless and riskless transaction. It doesn’t cost them anything (other than time in curating followers) and they never assume risk of an opinion since they generally select highly credible, semi non-controversial, mainstream sources. It’s the Twitter way of building reputation and influence.

The irony here I suppose, is that this very post could be sneered at as a light form of reputation arbitrage in and of itself. And I get that. But I had to share this, because this is the explanation/thought I’d been struggling to articulate for so long. Well done guys.

Full article here.

Having spent the last few months at the helm of a Facebook brand page for a legitimate brand, I have been growing increasingly frustrated with their platform. Yes, the promises of the interaction and all that come with this new channel are fantastic; but from an administrative standpoint, Facebook pages are a nightmare of useless reports and missing basic features, that leave a lot of the true power of this medium, on the table.

Here are ten things (in my opinion) that if Facebook addressed, would make the Facebook Pages platform, MUCH more powerful and useful for brands.

1. Target Landing Tab By User Type – I believe I saw this feature leaked out this past month when Facebook accidentally rolled some buggy code live, so it looks like this IS coming, which is great. Because there are generally two types of people that are hitting a Facebook fan page (existing fans and potential fans), and those two types of people should be presented with much different messaging and a much different funnel. Currently, admins can set a landing page other than the wall, but it’s an all or nothing setting. Being able to show potential fans one landing tab, and existing fans another, will be a huge improvement.
2. Non-Public Communication w/Fans – Every so often, a Facebook fan will pose a question, or voice a complaint, that requires the conversation be moved “offline”. Not necessarily because there is anything nefarious to hide, but sometimes personal contact information needs to be exchanged, the issue needs to be probed further, or there is just some other general interaction that is best not to have on a public wall with tens of thousands of other fans watching. But as a brand, there really isn’t any good way to initiate these private conversations. I, as an admin, could message the fan from my personal Facebook account, but that isn’t sensible. It would be fantastic if there was a private messaging function that allowed brands to initiate contact with fans in the event that there was some information exchange that needed to happen outside of the wall.
3. Photo And Video Responses – This is something that I’m surprised Facebook just doesn’t have in general, for all users (not just brands and fans). I’d love to be able to respond to wall posts and comments with photos or videos on occasion. Or even just initiate threads where users could respond to US with photos and videos. Both photo and video are such enormous parts of Facebook, it seems to reason that they could and should be able to exist within threaded conversations.
4. Special Styling For Admin Comments – This is something that has existed on blogs for a long time, and is extremely useful. When an admin or author responds to user comments within a giant thread, their comment is generally styled in such a way that it sticks out as being an admin/author response. Right now, if there is a Facebook wall post that has hundreds of comments, the admin responses are lost within the conversation, and other fans have no simple way of distinguishing “official” responses to a post, from those comments coming from other fans.
5. Threaded Replies – Again, something that might make sense for ALL of Facebook, not just fan pages. Within those aforementioned long comment strings, there is no way to reply to specific comments from fans, in threaded form. If a post has say 350 comments, and an admin wants to specifically address comment #47, the only real way to do so is to clumsily throw an @[username] in front of the admin comment, which ends up at the bottom of the entire string, and is so abstracted from the original question, that it’s really useless.
6. Page Merging w/Organization Pages – These auto-created, Wikipedia powered “Organization” pages are completely obnoxious. Their official look and feel, serves only to confuse users and potential fans, and cause headaches for brands and the page managers of actual official pages. At one point recently, there seemed to be a “merge with official page” function on these organization pages, but the process did literally nothing. And now it appears that this feature has been removed altogether. In our case, the “Organization” page for our brand has over 7,000 fans, and is growing daily. These users are fans that we’d love to engage with (and presumably want to engage with us), but unfortunately are out in some alternate bizarro brand page universe, lost forever.
7. Human Support – This is a pretty simple one. I know, that like Google and other big online companies with self-serve systems, it is near impossible to individually service every customer with a human. However, perhaps once a page reaches a certain fan threshold (50,000 fans? 75,000 fans? 100,000 fans?), a more official support channel could be opened up. Even an automated ticketing system that ROUTED to a person. I don’t need a dedicated account manager that I can reach 24/7, but it would be nice to be able to put in a support request, and have an actual person respond in a timely fashion when really needed.
8. Comparison Within The Category – Maybe this is a stretch, and maybe this is actually not good for Facebook to ever really offer, but I think there is great value to knowing how your page metrics compare to your category averages as a whole. One of the biggest complaints that I hear from almost every page admin I speak to, is that there isn’t a good way to really guage how their efforts and metrics stack up against the competition. Facebook pages could easily be categorized (“Hotels” or “Fast Food” or “Athletic Apparel” for instance), and then Facebook could theoretically show you how your page performs versus the rest of the category. Right now, I can manually look at number of fans for a set of competitors, but that’s about it. Other than that, I’ve got very little (or no) sense as to how we are faring versus, or compared to, the rest of our category.
9. Places Stats – Am I totally missing something here, or are stats for Facebook Places, completely useless? The “Insights” (and I use that term as lightly as can be) for our Places page shows three top-line stats in the reporting: “new likes”, “lifetime likes”, and “monthly active users”. Where the hell is the check-in data? Where are those stats? On the public front of the page, I can see total check-ins, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to look at check-in stats over time, or on a more granular basis. It seems to me that Facebook literally just dropped in the same crappy “Insights” dashboard to the Places pages, that exists on the regular brand pages, even though the data a Place owner would want to see, is materially different. This I just don’t get.
10. Stats And Reporting – Aside from being delayed AT LEAST a full day, if not more (this morning, which is the 30th, I can only see data through the 28th), the metrics are just uselessly terrible. If Facebook is serious about Pages (and Places) being a platform for brands, they NEED to overhaul their page reporting in 2011. There are a ton of good little analytics companies out there. Buy one, integrate it, and for the love of god, give us some data that we can actually use, and make informed decisions with.

Any other Facebook page admins out there have anything to add to this list?