Behavioral Targeting

We know what you clicked last night
The Age June 20, 2007 - 2:55PM Reuters

"Personal identity has taken on a new meaning in the digital age, where basic facts like your name, address or age are far less important to some people than the collected records of what you were looking at online.

Technologies for monitoring and interpreting internet habits as a predictor of future behavior cropped up at the start of this century, but only now are gaining momentum as the newest gold mine for websites and their advertisers. Known as behavioral targeting, the premise is to follow the sites you visit and build a picture of what products may interest you, then deliver related advertising in time for you to choose your purchase."

This article explores new methods for targeting consumers based on their internet habits. With many people having a public internet presence with blogs, websites, myspace, facebook and other social networking web sites, a great deal of personal data is exposed. While this gives marketers some interesting opportunities, there are ethical and privacy issues.

Latest article:
Every click you make, they'll be watching you

1. How effective do you think this web tracking technology is?

2. From a marketing perspective, what are the ethical issues?

3. From a consumer's perspective, what would be their concerns?

Death of Newspapers

Paul Gillin has written an essay and started a blog on the death of newspapers:

"I've started a new blog, Newspaper Death Watch, to monitor and comment upon the disintegration of the American metropolitan daily newspaper industry. If you keep an eye on this blog, you know that I have strong opinions about this topic. I believe that the collapse of this American institution will be stunningly swift and broad, with perhaps no more than a dozen major metros surviving until 2030. There's more detail in this essay."


1. Why are newspapers popular?
2. How can newspapers deal with the threat of the internet?
3. What are the implications for 'freedom of speech'?

Blog About Blogging

To all bloggers!

All students of the course are welcome to continue to be members of this blog. You are free to create posts on any topic of your choice and not restricted to strictly marketing or course related matters. I will act as moderator to help keep things flowing.

A few suggestions and help:

Blog Glossary
This is a link to a site that has a glossary of blog terms:
What Is

Labels and Tags
Use labels/tags when posting. In the bottom of the Compose window is an entry for labels for th post (screen shot above). You can select current ones and add your own. A post can have multiple labels. These are used to provide an 'index' of sorts so that you can find all the posts for a particular category. This index is in the left sidebar - check it out.

RMIT First University in Second Life

RMIT University is the first Victorian university to take part in virtual online world, Second Life. 13 students from the School of Architecture and Design have created an RMIT island, with digital sculptures, buildings and art. The island has cost the university almost $1k with its value already increasing. With six million users across the world, Second Life allows people to interact in virtual cities, towns and landscapes. Users are able to buy virtual property, businesses, clothes, and islands. (Source: Herald Sun)

Learn by clubbing in a virtual world

• Milanda Rout, June 20, 2007: The Australian
  

"RMIT University, new among campuses worldwide joining the weird, wired world of Second Life, has invested in a virtual island and is encouraging its students to visit virtual nightclubs and cafes.

Dozens of educational institutions across the US, Europe and now Australia are creating campuses in Second Life, a virtual world created, owned and run by online users.

Universities including Harvard are conducting lectures in the 3-D virtual world where more than seven million users create identities for themselves (avatars) and teleport to virtual cities, islands and even classrooms."

1. What is the potential for virtual worlds in education?
2. Would you attend a lecture or a tutorial in a virtual world?
3. What is the marketing implication for education in this situation?

The Mobile Web Is Here!!!!

Access to the internet has traditionally been through some sort of cable. Access via satellite is possible if you carry around a satellite dish! Wireless LANS now provide a wireless access within a short range to an internet modem or other wireless receiver that then connects via a cable. If you were clever enough you could connect a laptop to a mobile phone via a modem and use the mobile phone network for a slow and costly wireless internet access.

Recently true wireless, mobile internet access has become available via the mobile phone network that support high speed broadband. The major telecos provide a wireless adaptor that can plug into a laptop USB port and connect you at relatively high speed to the internet (at a higher cost than fixed line connection). One provider is :Telstra Bigpond

But wait there is more! The mobile phone can now connect directly to the internet and provide web browsing, email and most other internet services. This provided via the new 3G network.

A simple problem is that a mobile phone does not have the screen size or keyboard of laptop computer. This is a real marketing challenge!

Meg Tsiamis in her blog Dipping Into The Blogpond has provided a listing of web sites that are designed for mobile phone web browsing. Check out these two from her listing (remember that they are designed to appear in a mobile phone screen) :

http://mobile.tradingpost.com.au/
http://carsguide.mobi

1. How does the iPhone and similar devices attempt to overcome the design limitations?
2. What is the issue for SMEs to provide mobile internet access to their web sites?
3. What are the issues and impact on marketing using mobile internet?

Smile you are on googles candid camera

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/smile-youre-on-googles-candid-camera/2007/06/04/1180809390551.html


Hmmmm!!

Interesting

Tourism Australia In Global Online Push

Tourism Australia in global online push
James Livesley
Tourism Australia has relaunched its Australia.com website to spearhead a new marketing strategy that puts digital at the heart of its global push.
The site, which took more than a year to develop, will become a central gateway where tourists will be able to access visitor information from all of the individual state tourism sites.This is the first time a site has been developed as a joint initiative between Tourism Australia and the eight state and territory tourism organisations.At its launch this week, Tourism Australia managing director Geoff Buckley described the site as "the primary call to action for all of Tourism Australia's global marketing activities".However, B&T understands that the original intention for Australia.com was that it would be developed as an end-to-end website for all visitors and they would be serviced completely without leaving the site. Instead, the end result has seen the site become a gateway to the individual states and territories.For more on this story see the latest edition of B&T (1 June).
1 June 2007

Source: http://www.bandt.com.au/news/22/0C04D222.asp