Tales from the Techside

Congress will consider legislation shortly to create a national ‘Do Not Track’ registry. I just wanted to remind them, if this goes forward, to call Al Gore and remind him to turn off his internet, and be sure to shut down the dot servers on the way out the door.

Seriously.

As usual, when I start to write something you have to ask yourself - what is this, what is that, and what the hell does it have to do with real estate?

Sorry, but I am a fan of the Noam Chomsky school of thought that there are no easy, 30 second sound byte answers, and hence no easy questions. So allow me to do my usual routine of ‘unpacking’ some of this jargon to lay the table for our mental feast.

There are very many ‘cool’ things about the internet. From the end user perspective the advantages, the benefits, are nearly innumerable. From MY perspective, as an administrator and guardian of my memberships investment in technology, possibly the best part is VISIBILITY. It is this visibility that allows me to attempt to put together the pieces of the puzzle that is any communications strategy.

Think about it. I spend $5k to distribute a cd-rom or other media offering to my members… perhaps (god forbid) a print piece with lots of wonderful information. When the last unit ships, what then? Do I trust that I have done a good job and got the message across? Do I assume that 100% of the recipients received the package, opened the package, read the materials, and properly recycled the paper? Only if I am very gullible.

The point is, there is no real VISIBILITY to ‘traditional’ marketing. If there was, the same coupon book would not need to be recylced at my house every month for the rest of my life. The good folks over at happy nuisance coupons would have realized that I am NOT interested, and stopped marketing to me.

The flip side of course is the connected experience. I get metrics. I get uniques and total visits and stickiness and open/read rates and more. At a minimum this tells me whether my message is getting through. Better yet, if properly interpreted, it allows me to craft my message. In short, it allows me to understand your behavior and adapt to it.

That certainly sounds nice put that way. I can spend less money by modulating my strategy to be increasingly efficient. That savings can be passed on in turn to the consumer of those services.

Privacy advocates, on the other hand, are concerned. I can certainly understand this. There is an undeniable Orwellian aspect to this dilemna. It is a bitter irony that the wonders of the information age often come at the price of, well, information.

I submit that we need to be very cautious not to be too heavy handed in governing the internet. Mark has already written an excellent post on a similar issue as Congress also debates the fate of ‘net neutrality.’

In this case it is not equal rights to traffic that we are safeguarding, but rather the ability for me to know when you have read this blog, or logged into my member website, or opened an email and clicked a link to this resource or that. Obviously, these capabilities can be abused. The solution is not necessarily to eliminate them. In my opinion this will have a very tangible chilling effect on the growth and effectiveness of the internet.

Privacy experts worry about the fact that google has more and more data at their fingertips (there is a good reason why googles motto is ‘Don’t be evil’). Well folks, I hate to say it, but they are a search engine. How are they to perform this function well if they don’t watch and adapt to what people search for?

How are brokers and sales agents to manage their own online resources if they are not able to do the sorts of things that Mark and I have both advocated on this site - namely to maximize their ROI online by making smart choices and then observing whether they work. Use every avenue of feedback you can get, just do it without getting in the way of the consumers access to your content.

So Congress, please consider hard. There is a practical issue here, as a lot of people have invested a lot of money into being able to interact effectively with those who want our services. This gives us the luxury of not spamming those who don’t. Perhaps you should turn your focus inward, and consider the wisdom of throwing stones while living in glass white houses.

In the end, if you decide to create laws that eliminate behavioral feedback on the internet and www, please remember to ask Al Gore to turn it off, because it is done. Feedback, interactivity, is one of the good things about the www. It is one of several factors that come together to realize the massive economies of scale that the internet provides humanity.

If you don’t like google or others looking over your shoulder, perhaps it is just time to turn the channel. Otherwise, you start down a slippery slope that leads to a government maintained web and search engine. Fedoogle. None of us wants that.

No comments yet.

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI