Social Networking Sites and Advertising

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Internet Marketing and Privacy

For as long as there have been consumers, marketers have gathered information about consumers in order to better target a marketing pitch. With the advent of Internet advertising in the 1990s, marketers gained another avenue to track consumer behavior to send targeted marketing offers. This guide provides an overview of the best Web resources for learning about off-line and online consumer targeting practices. It educates you about the data that marketing companies may be gathering about you, and offers advice on how you may be able to control the data that is gathered about you.

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Offline Consumer Targeting

For how long have offline marketers have been collecting data on consumers ? The Consumer ... read more »

Online Advertising Technology

The world of online privacy can often seem overwhelming. Privacy policies written in ... read more »

Third-Party Advertising

Most advertisements on the Web are not served or sold by the sites you see hosting them, but by ... read more »

Social Networking Sites and Advertising

Every day millions of Americans freely list personal details of their lives on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. All of this potentially available information is an advertiser’s dream, and big business for social networking companies. But these sites and their advertisers must walk a fine line between advertising based on their users’ profiles and violating their users’ privacy rights.

Dulcinea's Insight

Myspace and Facebook both plan to target advertising based on information provided by users in their profiles. This potentially includes information ranging from your taste in movies or books to your sexual orientation and relationship status. The New York Times provides a description of MySpace’s plan and the Wall Street Journal has one of Facebook’s.

These programs and other forms of targeted advertising face potential backlashes from the vast user-bases of the social networking sites. Ironically, sites like MySpace and Facebook provide the ideal social tools for organizing consumer resistance to harmful advertising.

For tips on safely using social networking Web sites, visit the findingDulcinea Social Networking Web Guide.

Dulcinea's Picks

ReadWriteWeb addresses what is and what is not private on social networking sites. It also provides some guidance on how to remove your personal information from the Internet.

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Time describes the first Facebook “user-revolt” over a feature called the “News Feed” that was introduced in 2006. In a sign of the rapidly changing expectations of social network privacy, this initially controversial program has now become a regular facet of the Facebook experience.

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BusinessWeek has a revealing piece on Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The article examines Zuckerberg’s acknowledgement of mistakes in the creation of the site’s controversial “Beacon” advertising initiative and its ensuing backlash.

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