The Age of Openness

With my generations fixation with online profiles, blogging, photo sharing and email, has our obsession with broadcasting ones self to the world resulted in a loss of respect for the privacy of others, as well as own? 

A status written by someone can often reveal some quite personal information. In reality, who really thinks about who is going to read the status when it is written.

I for one certainly forget that out of my 450 friends, I actually only talk to about 80 of them and when I write a status I only ever think about them reading it, not some boy from my primary schools sister who now lives in another country.

From the ‘limited’ Facebook profile of mine the minimum a stranger can find out is: my date of birth; what university I am at; where I am currently living; who I’m in a relationship with and my current profile picture. This amount information may seem normal but as a member of Facebook it is the minimal amount of information you can reveal. I can’t chose to reveal any less information which I personally find quite worrying.

Mark Zukerberg (for those of you who haven't seen 'the social network' he is the mastermind behind Facebook) stated that "openness is the new social norm".

This all sounds well and good and I’m sure it would put many a persons mind at ease with the thought ‘well if everyone is doing it…’ But that flippant attitude is with regard to what we know we are revealing.

Facebook as a company can access your information, which is quite obvious due to the fact you entering it onto their site. But many are unaware that if you fail to tick or untick certain boxes, which are hidden amongst a load of technical and notoriously complicated legal jargon, your information can be passed on to other sites and organisations.
Facebook cleverly changes its privacy settings regularly so that unless you chose to customize them, you will automatically be given the default settings which are convenient to them. The smart part of this is that this information will pop up when you log onto Facebook, and the majority of people simply cannot be bothered to spend the time changing these settings. People are therefore unknowingly giving away personal information and unwillingly loosing their privacy.

Search Engine Marketing: Has Yahoo Gone Too Far?

If you mention the term 'search engine' to someone the first thing that will pop into their head is the infamous Google which is used over 200 million times a day world wide.

The majority of people, myself included, wonder what on earth they would do without it. In my day to day life, if there is ever anything I want to know or do I will depend on   Google to find it. If not Google then it will be Yahoo!, Bing or Ask: the wonderful group of know-it-all websites that have created a world where no question goes unanswered and no image is out of reach and where knowledge is endless.

It is no surprise then that Google smartly created Adwords and Adsense: A form of ‘paid search advertising’ and now 40% of online advertising expenditure is spent on search advertising (Klassen, 2008). This works by advertising websites by the side of the natural results, Google separates them so that the user is aware of the natural results and the ones which have paid to be there.

Adwords (by Google, Yahoo! And Msn also have versions) is when advertisers choose a set of workds or phrases which relate to their product or which will positively associate with the brand. If such words are entered the website willl appear. The service is ‘pay-per-click’ so the advertiser will only pay when the service works. Adsense is different because it is contextually targeted.                                                                                             

Every time I enter a search in Google I rely on it to produce a vast amount of websites and possibilities but I very rarely click past the first ‘o’ and more often than not I will settle for the first 3 results. This is due to a multiple of reasons, one of them being that I’m too lazy to traipse through the thousands if not millions of results but mainly because I believe that the results on the first page are normally the most reliable genuine and closely linked to my request. Yahoo! Have now created a form of paid ‘search advertising’ which takes advantage of this trust and embeds its advertisements in with the search results giving the illusion that they were natural. In 2009 Google were thinking of using interest based advertisements which were specific to each user by gathering information from the users’ cookies.

Although both of these alternative methods of Search Engine Marketing may produce better results, are they fair? They do not ask the consent of the search engine users, are producing misleading results and are beginning to become an invasion of privacy.

Innovative Products = Innovative Media

‘Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything’ said Steve Jobs in his keynote when Apple launched the iPhone. In innovation theory there is a term for such a rare product. It’s called ‘dominant design' and was introduced by James Utterback. In his innovation classic, ‘Dynamics of innovation’ (1992), his definition is: “A dominant design in a product class is, by definition, the one that wins the allegiance of the marketplace, the one that competitors and innovators must adhere to if they hope to command significant market following” and the Apple iPhone has done just this. Just by looking at the aesthetics of mobile phones... They all tend to fit the same mould.

Apple’s been very fortunate as it has introduces a few of these dominant designs into the world.  In 1984 they introduced the Macintosh, the iPod in 2001 and then the iPhone in 2007.

To quote Jobs some more, he said, "I have been looking forward to this for two and a half years", and that "today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone." Jobs introduced the iPhone as a combination of three devices: a "widescreen iPod with touch controls"; a "revolutionary mobile phone" and a "breakthrough Internet communicator". This is why the iPhone was truly innovative. It pushed the boundaries, created a product people didn't know they needed and yet it is a product which they now cannot live without and which many other mobile phone manufacturers have copied. Welcome to the take over of the smart phone.

The development of the smart phone has made a massive impact on the advertising world in particular. A mobile phone is a person’s number one possession and it is certainly mine. I cannot leave the house without it; I compulsively check it ever 15 minutes; it has all my contacts on it; my photos; my videos and is now a means of internet access. My phone is practically my life.

To advertisers, the mobile phone is a dream. If advertisers can successfully communicate via a mobile then they have hit the jack pot and this is why innovative advertising is taking place. The fact that your mobile is so personal is also a disadvantage. It is somewhere that people do not want to be bombarded by offers deals and messages. Overstepping the mark could be the death of a campaign. Simply sending a text to someone isn’t going to be effective; neither is a banner advertisement on a mobile website.

New ways of communicating through the mobile phone are being thought up all the time. QR codes, which I have previously discussed, are just one of the brilliant methods to connect an audience to a company through the use of the mobile. Hundreds of advertising agencies have popped up all around the UK. Specialising in things like augmented reality and app development.

QR Codes Continued

After my pervious post on QR codes I discovered these little gems:

A QRcode that a fashionista would appreciate!

Theses QR codes have been adapted by fashion brands, keen to gain some geek points. Tokyo based creative agency SET developed this for Marc by Marc Jacobs which can be used to his access his new mobile site.

The agency also produced one for Louis Vuitton, collaboratiing with Takishi Murakami (the man behind the famous art work on the LV bags) to come up with this good looking code.

These little codes look more appealing than the standard QR code and because they work they also have the same function and benefits!